Salman Rushdie

“Most of what matters in our lives takes place in our absence.”

“What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.”

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

“The moment you declare a set of ideas to be immune from criticism, satire, derision, or contempt, freedom of thought becomes impossible.”

“From the beginning, men used God to justify the unjustifiable.”

“Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true.”

“To be born again, first you have to die.”

“Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts.”

“Two things form the bedrock of any open society — freedom of expression and rule of law. If you don't have those things, you don't have a free country.”

“Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems—but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible.”

“How does newness come into the world? How is it born? Of what fusions, translations, conjoinings is it made?”

“One of the extraordinary things about human events is that the unthinkable becomes thinkable.”

“The free exchange of ideas, the contentious, argumentative, noisy exchange of ideas, is the bedrock of a free society.”

“We are all, every one of us, treasured script.”

“Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, the power to retell it, rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change, truly are powerless, because they cannot think new thoughts.”

“A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return.”

“An attack on a book is an attack on the mind. It is a symbol of an attack on the person.”