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

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

I never thought of myself as a writer about religion until a religion came after me.

- Salman Rushdie

In the movies, the writer is just the servant, the employee.

- Salman Rushdie

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

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

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

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

When people do the cowardly thing, it's not about respect, it's about fear.

- Salman Rushdie

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

- Salman Rushdie