Salman Rushdie

All my adult life, if I didn't have several hours a day to sit in a room by myself, I would get antsy and irritable.

Have you noticed the physical resemblance between Imran Khan and Gaddafi? If you were making a movie of the life of Gaddafi and you wanted a slightly better-looking version of Gaddafi, you might cast Imran Khan.

The Satanic Verses' was denied the ordinary life of a novel. It became something smaller and uglier: an insult.

I was 21 in 1968, so I'm as much a child of the '60s as is possible to be. In those years the subject of religion had really almost disappeared; the idea that religion was going to be a major force in the life of our societies, in the West anyway, would have seemed absurd in 1968.

I didn't want to become some embittered old hack getting his revenge for the rest of my life. And I didn't want to become some scared creature cowering in a corner. I remember telling myself not to carry the hatred around, although I know where it is. I have it in a trunk in storage.

It's so disappointing, to put it mildly, that people know so much about my life. Because it means that they're always trying to look at my books in terms of my life.

Our lives are not what we deserve; they are, let us agree, in many ways deficient.

Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.

Our lives teach us who we are.

If you live in free countries, you don't have to spend all your life arguing about freedom because it is all around you. It seems redundant to make a lot of noise about something when, in fact, there it is. But if someone tries to remove it, it becomes important for you to formulate your own defenses of it.

In the experience of art, time seems not to exist.

Many of us didn't believe in the image of bin Laden as a wandering Old Man of the Mountains, living on plants and insects in an inhospitable cave somewhere on the porous Pakistan-Afghan border.