3 December 2020 Salman Rushdie If I were asked for a one-sentence sound bite on religion, I would say I was against it.
3 December 2020 Salman Rushdie Rock and roll music – the music of freedom frightens people and unleashes all manner of conservative defense mechanisms.
3 December 2020 Salman Rushdie If you take a look at history, you will find that the understanding of what is good and evil has always existed before the individual religions. The religions were only invented by people afterwards, in order to express this idea.
3 December 2020 Salman Rushdie Vertigo is the conflict between the fear of falling and the desire to fall.
3 December 2020 Salman Rushdie Throughout human history, the apostles of purity, those who have claimed to possess a total explanation, have wrought havoc among mere mixed-up human beings.
3 December 2020 Salman Rushdie There is a widespread difficulty in the Muslim world, which has to do with how the people are taught about examining their own history. A whole range of stuff has been placed off limits.
3 December 2020 Salman Rushdie If you actually want to change your world, there is a better way of doing it than blowing yourself up.
3 December 2020 Salman Rushdie What one writer can make in the solitude of one room is something no power can easily destroy.
3 December 2020 Salman Rushdie What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.
3 December 2020 Salman Rushdie What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness second, their imagination, and third, their industry.
3 December 2020 Salman Rushdie I’ve never had very high regard for therapists. I owe my health, my mental survival, to my friends and loved ones.
3 December 2020 Salman Rushdie The only way of living in a free society is to feel that you have the right to say and do stuff.
3 December 2020 Salman Rushdie Such is the miraculous nature of the future of exiles: what is first uttered in the impotence of an overheated apartment becomes the fate of nations.
3 December 2020 Salman Rushdie A poet’s work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.
3 December 2020 Salman Rushdie 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.
3 December 2020 Salman Rushdie In this world without quiet corners, there can be no easy escapes from history, from hullabaloo, from terrible, unquiet fuss.
