Salman Rushdie

When people do the cowardly thing, it's not about respect, it's about fear.

In general, writers shouldn't be killed for what they write, though I can think of exceptions.

Someone asked me if I was afraid to write my memoirs. I told him: 'We have to stop drawing up accounts of fear! We live in a society in which people are allowed to tell their story, and that is what I do.'

I've never rejected the world I came from. To be rejected by it is horrible.

What happened in Pakistan was that people were told: You're all Muslim, so now you're a country. As we saw in 1971 with the Bangladesh secession, the answer to that was: 'Oh no, we're not.'

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.

What one writer can make in the solitude of one room is something no power can easily destroy.

Rohinton Mistry's celebrated novel 'Such a Long Journey' was pulled off the syllabus of Mumbai University because local extremists objected to its content.

I am clearly vulnerable to these more passionate and volatile unstable relationships. I am trying to not be so vulnerable.

When you have children, your perspective on the parent-child relationship alters.

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.