Salman Rushdie

“I am not in the business of suppressing books.”

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

“The frustrating part of being tagged 'controversial' is people go looking for trouble where there isn't any to look for.”

“When I'm writing a book, sentence by sentence, I'm not thinking theoretically. I'm just trying to work out the story from inside the characters I've got.”

“The thing about literature is that, yes, there are kind of tides of fashion, you know; people come in and out of fashion; writers who are very celebrated fall into, you know, people you know...”

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

“I can walk into a bookshop and point out a number of books that I find very unattractive in what they say. But it doesn't occur to me to burn the bookshop down. If you don't like a book, rea...”

“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 beli...”

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

“Speaking as somebody with three sisters and a very largely female Muslim family, there is not a single woman I know in my family or in their friends who would have accepted the wearing of a...”

“I think the veil is a way of taking power away from women.”

“Vertigo is the conflict between the fear of falling and the desire to fall.”

“Everybody loves 'The Wire,' and I think it's okay, but in the end it's just a police series.”

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