Friendships are the family we make - not the one we inherit. I've always been someone to whom friendship, elective affinities, is as important as family. -Salman Rushdie Friendship
Perhaps because my relationship with my father went through such a long, bumpy time, it's been very important for me to work to try to keep lines of communication open between my sons and myself to try to avoid my father's mistakes. At least if you're making mistakes, make different mistakes. -Salman Rushdie Relationship
I never thought of myself as a writer about religion until a religion came after me. -Salman Rushdie Religion
The question I'm always asking myself is: are we masters or victims? Do we make history, or does history make us? Do we shape the world, or are we just shaped by it? The question of do we have agency in our lives or whether we are just passive victims of events is, I think, a great question, and one that I have always tried to ask. -Salman Rushdie History
I've always prided myself on my discipline as a writer. I do it like a job. I get up in the morning and go to my desk. -Salman Rushdie Morning
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.' -Salman Rushdie Society
Throughout human history, the apostles of purity, those who have claimed to possess a total explanation, have wrought havoc among mere mixed-up human beings. -Salman Rushdie History
I had a very difficult relationship with my father, which ended up okay, but there were many difficult years. -Salman Rushdie Relationship
A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep. -Salman Rushdie Poetry
This is going to make me sound ancient, but I remember Juhu Beach when there weren't any buildings on it. You'd go through countryside and arrive at this amazing beach. I remember driving from Delhi to the Qutab Minar through countryside. Mehrauli was a little village - that's all gone. -Salman Rushdie Amazing
In this world without quiet corners, there can be no easy escapes from history, from hullabaloo, from terrible, unquiet fuss. -Salman Rushdie History
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. -Salman Rushdie Society
I do think of Bombay as my hometown. Those are the streets I walked when I was learning to walk. And it's the place that my imagination has returned to more than anywhere else. -Salman Rushdie Imagination
It is literature which for me opened the mysterious and decisive doors of imagination and understanding. To see the way others see. To think the way others think. And above all, to feel. -Salman Rushdie Imagination
I do have a lot of time for people in my life, and friendship is a very important subject for me. I think I'm unusual among the writers I know in that respect. -Salman Rushdie Respect
Rock and roll music - the music of freedom frightens people and unleashes all manner of conservative defense mechanisms. -Salman Rushdie Freedom
What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry. -Salman Rushdie Imagination
Rock and roll music - the music of freedom frightens people and unleashes all manner of conservative defense mechanisms. -Salman Rushdie Music
