Salman Rushdie

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.

A poet's work is to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.

Writers shouldn't have lives that are interesting. It gets in the way of your work.

Writers have been in terrible situations and have yet managed to produce extraordinary work.

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.

It is often said by religious people that without its framework, there is no sense of right or wrong. My view is that religion comes after ethics.

If the creative artist worries if he will still be free tomorrow, then he will not be free today.

Hyperrealism can create an atmosphere of surrealism because nobody sees the world in such detail.

When you are writing a book, it feels as if you are simply concentrating on the world of the book and that whatever is happening in your personal life is outside the room, as it were. But maybe that's just the way you have to talk to yourself to make it possible.

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.