Salman Rushdie

"A question I have often asked is, "What would an inoffensive political cartoon look like?" What would a respectful cartoon look like? The form requires disrespect and so if we are going to have in the world things like cartoons and satire, we just have to accept it as part of the price of freedom."

"It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity. Which seems to be self-evidently true; but I suggest that the writer who is out-of-country and even out-of-language may experience this loss in an intensified form. It is made more concrete for him by the physical fact of discontinuity, of his present being in a different place from his past, of his being "elsewhere"... human beings do not perceive things whole; we are not gods but wounded creatures, cracked lenses, capably only of fractured perceptions. Partial beings, in all the senses of that phrase. Meaning is a shaky edifice we build out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old films, small victories, people hated, people loved; perhaps it is because of our sense of what is the case is constructed from such inadequate materials that we defend it so fiercely, even to the death."

"The mistake of the West was to put the Sauds on the throne of Saudi Arabia and give them control of the worlds oil fortune, which they then used to propagate Wahhabi Islam. This very minor extremist cult, Wahhabism, was suddenly propagated across the Muslim world through madrassas and has created generations now who are steeped in this harsher, more paranoid, more confrontational version of Islam."

"Who what am I? My answer: I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after Ive gone which would not have happened if I had not come. Nor am I particularly exceptional in this matter; each "I", everyone of the now-six-hundred-million-plus of us, contains a similar multitude. I repeat for the last time: to understand me, youll have to swallow a world."

"Two things form the bedrock of any open society—freedom of expression and rule of law. If you dont have those things, you dont have a free country."

"Our lives teach us who we are." I have learned the hard way that when you permit anyone elses description of reality to supplant your own — and such descriptions have been raining down on me, from security advisers, governments, journalists, Archbishops, friends, enemies, mullahs — then you might as well be dead. Obviously, a rigid, blinkered, absolutist world view is the easiest to keep hold of, whereas the fluid, uncertain, metamorphic picture Ive always carried about is rather more vulnerable. Yet I must cling with all my might to ... my own soul; must hold on to its mischievous, iconoclastic, out-of-step clown-instincts, no matter how great the storm. And if that plunges me into contradiction and paradox, so be it; Ive lived in that messy ocean all my life. Ive fished in it for my art. This turbulent sea was the sea outside my bedroom window in Bombay. It is the sea by which I was born, and which I carry within me wherever I go. "Free speech is a non-starter," says one of my Islamic extremist opponents. No, sir, it is not. Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself."

"For many people, Ive ceased to be a human being. Ive become an issue, a bother, an "affair." ... And has it really been so long since religions persecuted people, burning them as heretics, drowning them as witches, that you cant recognize religious persecution when you see it? ... What is my single life worth? Despair whispers in my ear: "Not a lot." But I refuse to give in to despair ... because ... I know that many people do care, and are appalled by the ... upside-down logic of the post-fatwa world, in which a ... novelist can be accused of having savaged or "mugged" a whole community, becoming its tormentor (instead of its ... victim) and the scapegoat for ... its discontents... . (What minority is smaller and weaker than a minority of one?)"

"What kind of God is it whos upset by a cartoon in Danish?"

"Ive been worrying about God a little bit lately. It seems as if hes been lashing out, you know, destroying cities, annihilating places. It seems like hes been in a bad mood. And I think it has to do with the quality of lovers hes been getting. If you look at the people who love God now, you know, if I was God, Id need to destroy something."

"Nothing really improves us. Whatever improves one person will disimprove another. Some people are paralyzed by the consciousness of death, other people live with it. ... The fatwa certainly made me think about it a lot more than I ever had. I guess I know Im going to die, but then, so are you. And one of the things that I thought a lot about at the time of the fatwa and ever since is that quite a few of the people I really care about died during this period, all about the same age as I am, and they were not under a death sentence. They just died, of lung cancer, AIDS, whatever. It occurred to me that you dont need a fatwa, it can happen anytime."

"There were six hundred thousand Indian troops in Kashmir but the pogrom of the pandits was not prevented, why was that. Three and a half lakhs of human beings arrived in Jammu as displaced persons and for many months the government did not provide shelters or relief or even register their names, why was that."

"Nowadays, however, a powerful tribe of clerics has taken over Islam. These are the contemporary Thought Police. They have turned Muhammad into a perfect being, his life into a perfect life, his revelation into the unambiguous, clear event it originally was not. Powerful taboos have been erected. One may not discuss Muhammad as if he were human, with human virtues and weaknesses. One may not discuss the growth of Islam as a historical phenomenon, as an ideology born out of its time. These are the taboos against which The Satanic Verses has transgressed (these and one other; I also tried to write about the place of women in Islamic society, and in the Koran). It is for this breach of taboo that the novel is being anathematized, fulminated against, and set alight."