Salman Rushdie

What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.

The only people who see the whole picture are the ones who step outside the frame.

A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return.

Nobody can take jokes. That’s why they’re jokes.

The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.

A writer’s life is a highly vulnerable, almost naked activity. We don’t have to weep about that. The writer makes his choice and is stuck with it.

The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas—uncertainty, progress, change—into crimes.

Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems—but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems incredible.

The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself.

The Satanic Verses is a novel about migration, metamorphosis, divided selves, love, death, London, and Bombay. It is a serious work of literature.

To be a writer is to be a criminal. To be a writer is to be a transgressor. It's to be someone who goes across the line.

Religion, a mediaeval form of unreason, when combined with modern weaponry becomes a real threat to our freedoms. This religious totalitarianism has caused a new world war.

To be a writer is to be an outsider. It is to be someone who stands on the edges of society, looking in, and then reporting what he sees.

The idea that some thoughts are too dangerous to be thought is a dangerous idea for freedom.

Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice.

The world is full of people who are very happy to tell you what you should write and how you should write it. And if you listen to them, you’ll never write anything.

A book is a collaboration between a writer and a reader. The writer provides the words, but the reader provides the meaning.

The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.

I am a writer. I do not have to be polite. I do not have to be nice. I do not have to be politically correct. I have to be true to my imagination.

The fundamentalist seeks to bring down a new Dark Age, when knowledge will be replaced by dogma, and the light of reason extinguished.