Salman Rushdie

Human beings, you see, do absolutely two primary things. We see like and unlike. Like becomes, in literature, simile and metaphor. Unlike becomes uniqueness and difference, from which I believe, the novel is born.

The acceptance that all that is solid has melted into the air, that reality and morality are not givens but imperfect human constructs, is the point from which fiction begins.

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.

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

Sometimes I think that when people become famous, there's a public perception that they are not human beings any more. They don't have feelings; they don't get hurt; you can act and say as you like about them.

It's true that the human body is more vulnerable than the products of the human mind.

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

What I worry about and don't like is the way in which the ideology of multiculturalism has declined into cultural relativism. I think that's very dangerous. When the Archbishop of Canterbury, for God's sake, says that you can't have one law for everybody... that's stupid.

If my child had prejudice in his head, I'd be ashamed. I would see it as my failure as a parent.

People must be protected from prejudice against their person. But people cannot be protected from prejudice against their ideas - because otherwise we're all done.

A novel, I think, is partly about the contemporary and partly about the eternal, and it's the balance of that that's difficult to achieve.

If you look at Indian movies, every time they wanted an exotic locale, they would have a dance number in Kashmir. Kashmir was India's fairyland. Indians went there because in a hot country you go to a cold place. People would be entranced by the sight of snow.