Salman Rushdie

“This is what loss was, what death was: an escape into the luminous wave-forms, into the ineffable speed of the light-years and the parsecs, the eternally receding distances of the cosmos.”

“In today's U.S., it's possible for almost anyone - women, gays, African-Americans, Jews - to run for, and be elected to, high office.”

“The West should be tougher on Pakistan. It is trying to play both ends against the middle - to look like the friend of the revolutionaries on the one hand and a friend of the West in the fight against terrorism. It can't be both things.”

“If I had simply wanted to trade on an insult to Islam, I could have done it in a sentence rather than writing a 250,000-word novel, a work of fiction.”

“It has been observed that all Americans need a frontier: pain was hers, and she was determined to push it out.”

“Our lives teach us who we are.”

“Bin Laden was born filthy rich and died in a rich man's house, which he had painstakingly built to the highest specifications.”

“If the culture shifts, if people think differently about women, the art will shift, too. You can't ask art to make social change. It's not what it's for.”

“In Iran, fundamentalism was fuelled to an extent by the regime of the Shah being supported by the West.”

“Certainly, the Hollywood cinema, there's almost nothing of interest coming out of there.”

“..now, seated hunched over paper in a pool of Anglepoised light, I no longer want to be anything except what who I am. Who what am I? My answer: I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I've gone which would not have happened if I had not come. Nor am I particularly exceptional in this matter; each 'I', every one of the now-six-hundred-million-plus of us, contains a similar multitude. I repeat for the last time: to understand me, you'll have to swallow a world.”

“The accidents of my life have given me the ability to make stories in which different parts of the world are brought together, sometimes harmoniously, sometimes in conflict, and sometimes both - usually both. The difficulty in these stories is that if you write about everywhere you can end up writing about nowhere.”

“Masks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull.”

“Killing people because you don't like their ideas - it's a bad thing.”

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

“I think, in a written novel, the way in which you play with the readers' emotion or the way in which you engage the readers' emotions can be very indirect. You could come at it through irony or comedy, etcetera, and you could capture people's sympathies and feelings kind of by stealth if you like.”

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

“Like everybody else, I've had relationships in which I was passionately in love but was completely miserable all the time and didn't trust the person I was in love with one inch.”

“When he was young, he told her, each phase of his life, each self he tried on, had seemed reassuringly temporary. Its imperfections didn't matter, because he could easily replace one moment by the next, one Saladin by another.”

“I'm a world expert on superhero comics. I think maybe only Michael Chabon knows more than me.”