Salman Rushdie

If Woody Allen were a Muslim, he'd be dead by now. 

In this world without quiet corners, there can be no easy escapes from history, from hullabaloo, from terrible, unquiet fuss. 

It is very, very easy not to be offended by a book. You just have to shut it. 

Most of what matters in your life takes place in your absence. 

Names, once they are in common use, quickly become mere sounds, their etymology being buried, like so many of the earth's marvels, beneath the dust of habit. 

One of the extraordinary things about human events is that the unthinkable becomes thinkable. 

Our lives are not what we deserve; they are, let us agree, in many ways deficient. 

Our lives teach us who we are. 

Rock and roll music - the music of freedom frightens people and unleashes all manner of conservative defense mechanisms. 

Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts.

Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one. 

Doubt, it seems to me, is the central condition of a human being in the twentieth century. 

Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself. 

I do not need the idea of God to explain the world I live in. 

I hate admitting that my enemies have a point. 

I used to say, 'There is a God-shaped hole in me.' For a long time I stressed the absence, the hole. Now I find it is the shape which has become more important. 

If I were asked for a one-sentence sound bite on religion, I would say I was against it.