Also – for there had been more than a few migrants aboard, yes, quite a quantity of wives who had been grilled by reasonable, doing-their-job officials about the length of and distinguishing moles upon their husbands’ genitalia, a sufficiency of children upon whose legitimacy the British Government had cast its ever-reasonable doubts – mingling with the remnants of the plane, equally fragmented, equally absurd, there floated the debris of the soul, broken memories, sloughed-off selves, severed mother-tongues, violated primaries, untranslatable jokes, extinguished futures, lost loves, the forgotten meaning of hollow, booming words, land, belonging, home.

— Salman Rushdie

A man who catches History's eye is thereafter bound to a mistress from whom he will never escape.

— Salman Rushdie

Among the great struggles of man-good/evil, reason/unreason, etc.-there is also this mighty conflict between the fantasy of Home and the fantasy of Away, the dream of roots and the mirage of the journey.

— Salman Rushdie

An attack upon our ability to tell stories is not just censorship - it is a crime against our nature as human beings.

— Salman Rushdie

And eventually in that house where everyone, even the fugitive hiding in the cellar from his faceless enemies, finds his tongue cleaving dryly to the roof of his mouth, where even the sons of the house have to go into the cornfield with the rickshaw boy to joke about whores and compare the length of their members and whisper furtively about dreams of being film directors (Han if's dream, which horrifies his dream-invading mother, who believes the cinema to be an extension of the brothel business), where life has been transmuted into grotesquely by the irruption into it of history, eventually in the murkiness of the underworld he cannot help himself, he finds his eyes straying upwards, up along delicate sandals and baggy pajamas and past loose Kurt and above the udātta, the cloth of modesty, until eyes meet eyes, and then

— Salman Rushdie

And in Kandahar he was taught about survival, about fighting and killing and hunting, and he learned much else without being taught, such as looking out for himself and watching his tongue and not saying the wrong thing, the thing that might get him killed. About the dignity of the lost, about losing, and how it cleansed the soul to accept defeat, and about letting go, avoiding the trap of holding on too tightly to what you wanted, and about abandonment in general, and in particular fatherless, the lossless of fathers, the lossless of the fatherless, and the best defenses of those who are less against those who are more: unwariness, forethought, cunning, humility and good peripheral vision. The many lessons of lossless. The lessening from which growing could begin.

— Salman Rushdie

A photograph is a moral decision taken in one eighth of a second.

— Salman Rushdie

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

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

— 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 are

— Salman Rushdie