Quotes

I still refuse to call it 'Mumbai', as do many people who live there. It's not ancient like Delhi, with thousands of years of history. Essentially it's a city the British built because they thought the natural harbour would be useful to the navy. They reclaimed land to join together seven islands into what is now the peninsula of south Bombay, then they built a fort and the city grew around it.

You can't be elected dog-catcher in America unless you're a Christian. For someone like me who spent a lot of his adult life in England and western Europe,it's probably the biggest single difference between the United States and the rest of the western democracies.

Education changes the world. If you have generations of children being brought up in extremist madrasas to believe that that world view is the correct world view, then you create generations of people with built-in hostilities. Even if nothing had happened to exacerbate those hostilities, even if there had not been an Iraq war, the mindset of generations, particularly of young men, has been badly affected. You see that anti-semitism is taken for granted, and that a highly misogynistic world view is propagated, where the role of women is cast as secondary. And when you get to other issues like the treatment of religious minorities or sexual minorities, there's a fantastic hostility. So you're bringing up generations of bigoted children.

[on a forced shutdown in Sri Lanka during the filming of 'Midnight's Children'] We lost two day's shooting and a lot of sleep. It's clear that there was somebody in the Iranian foreign ministry - I don't know who, and I don't know at how high a level it was, but someone - said to the Sri Lankan ambassador they they disapproved of the permission having been given [to film] and that it should be revoked. Fortunately Deepa [Mehta] as part of the process of planning the film, had personally been to see the president of Sri Lanka [as a project for]trying to develop the film industry in Sri Lanka, develop it as a location for filming, and that they saw this as being a kind of showcase for that. So they were very supportive of it.. The moment we got to the president's office he said, 'No,of course you must make your film'.

[on how he managed to weather the storm over 'Satanic Verses'] Just by being bloody-minded. I think I'm tougher than I thought I was. One of the things...was that I just wanted to be myself... to keep writing books I wanted to write. I think, if you knew nothing about my life story, if you'd never seen anything about my life and all you had was my books to look at, there isn't a great rift in 1989. It's not that writing after that is radically different in the writing before that. I think [it] has its own continuity, and I've tried very hard to do that.

The lessons learned at school are not necessarily those the school thinks it's teaching.

The suicide bomber's imagination leads him to believe in a brilliant act of heroism, when in fact he is blowing himself up pointlessly and taking other people's lives.

I stand with Charlie Hebdo, as we all must, to defend the art of satire, which has always been a force of liberty and against tyranny, dishonesty and stupidity. "Respect for religion" has become a code phrase meaning "fear of religion". Religions, like all other ideas, deserve criticism, satire, and yes, our fearless disrespect.

[Comment on the Fatwa] I wish I'd written a more offensive book...

[observation, 2017] I feel about England right now that it's like a family having a picnic on a railway track. "What's the problem? What's that hooting noise? Owls?" I mean, they don't seem to understand what's about to happen to them.

I was in a yellow cab with a Sikh taxi driver who told me he was going to vote for Trump. And I said, "Why would you do a thing like that? He doesn't like people like you and me." And he said, "Oh, sir, Mr. Trump, he's a straight shooter, says what he thinks, doesn't give a fuck". And I thought, Oh, Trump's going to win.

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

In order to understand one life, you have to swallow the World.

Europe is in greater danger now than at any time in the last 70 years, and if one believes in that idea it's time to stand up and be counted. In the UK, I hope parliament may yet have the courage to call for a second referendum. That could rescue the country from the calamity of Brexit and go a long way towards rescuing the EU as well.

People didn't like it. Because I should have died. Now that I've almost died, everybody loves me. . . . That was my mistake, back then. Not only did I live but I tried to live well. Bad mistake. Get fifteen stab wounds, much better.

I've always thought that my books are more interesting than my life. Unfortunately, the world appears to disagree.

The defence of free expression begins at the point at which somebody says something you don't like. It's a very simple thing, but it's being forgotten. That is what's enshrined in the first amendment ... In the US, you feel there's a younger generation that's kind of forgetting the value of that. Often, for reasons they would believe to be virtuous, they're prepared to suppress kinds of speech with which they don't sympathise. It's a slippery slope. And look out, because the person slipping down that slope could be you.

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.

It matters, it always matters, to name rubbish as rubbish ... to do otherwise is to legitimize it.

It is a funny view of the world that a book can cause riots.

The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas - uncertainty, progress, change - into crimes.

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

There is a point beyond which conciliation looks like capitulation. I do not believe I passed that point, but others have thought otherwise.

Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination of the heart.

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 I've gone which would not have happened if I had not come.

I do not envy people who think they have a complete explanation of the world, for the simple reason that they are obviously wrong.

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".

In an ideal world you could reunite the Pakistan-occupied part of Kashmir with the Indian-occupied part and restore the old borders. You could have both India and Pakistan agreeing to guarantee those borders, demilitarise the area, and to invest in it economically. In a sane world that would happen but we don't live in a sane world.

I guess I know I'm 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 don't need a fatwa, it can happen anytime.

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; I've lived in that messy ocean all my life. I've 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.

It's fun to read things when you don't know all the words. Even children love it. One of the things any great children's writer will tell you is that children like it if in books designed for their age group there is a vocabulary just slightly bigger than theirs. So they come up against weird words, and the weird words excite them.

"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.

The idea that James Bond could be made politically correct is almost comical. I think that has to be resisted. Books have to come to us from their time and be of their time, and if that's difficult to take, don't read them. Read another book, but don't try and remake yesterday's work in the light of today's attitudes.

I'm not a geopolitical entity. I'm someone writing in a room.

Nothing really improves us. Whatever improves one person will disimprove another.

There is no right in the world not to be offended. That right simply doesn't exist. In a free society, an open society, people have strong opinions, and these opinions very often clash. In a democracy, we have to learn to deal with this. And this is true about novels, it's true about cartoons, it's true about all these products.

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.

I'll tell you quite truthfully that the great wound in my life is India, because of the way I and my work have been treated there. (2021)

What I kind of rebelled against was E.M. Forster's English, which is very cool and meticulous. I thought, If there's one thing that India is not, it's not cool. It's hot and noisy and crowded and excessive. How do you find a language that's like that?

I think a lot of men are scared of women, and if the women are competent, brilliant or self-assured, they become even scarier. But to me, that's enormously attractive. I can't dream of having as a friend, or anything else in my life, a woman who is not those things.

I've got nothing else to do. I would like to have a second skill, but I don't. I always envied writers like Günter Grass, who had a second career as a visual artist. I thought how nice it must be to spend a day wrestling with words, and then get up and walk down the street to your art studio and become something completely else. I don't have that. So, all I can do is this. As long as there's a story that I think is worth giving my time to, then I will. (2023)

When I have a book in my head, it's as if the rest of the world is in its correct shape.

Art is not a luxury. It stands at the essence of our humanity, and it asks for no special protection except the right to exist. It accepts argument, criticism, even rejection. It does not accept violence.

United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan has said that we should now define ourselves not only by what we are for but by what we are against. I would reverse that proposition, because in the present instance what we are against is a no-brainer. Suicidist assassins ram wide-bodied aircraft into the World Trade Center and Pentagon and kill thousands of people: um, I'm against that. But what are we for? What will we risk our lives to defend? (2002)

The fundamentalist believes that we believe in nothing. In his world-view, he has his absolute certainties, while we are sunk in sybaritic indulgences. To prove him wrong, we must first know that he is wrong. We must agree on what matters: kissing in public places, bacon sandwiches, disagreement, cutting-edge fashion, literature, generosity, water, a more equitable distribution of the world's resources, movies, music, freedom of thought, beauty, love. These will be our weapons. Not by making war but by the unafraid way we choose to live shall we defeat them.

How to defeat terrorism? Don't be terrorized. Don't let fear rule your life. Even if you are scared.

I'm going to tell you really truthfully, I'm not thinking about the long term. I'm thinking about little step by little step. I just think: Bop till you drop. (2023)

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.

Islam doesn't have to mean blind faith. It can mean what it always meant in your family, a culture, a civilization, as open-minded as your grandfather was, as delightedly disputatious as your father was... Don't let the zealots make Muslim a terrifying word, I urged myself; remember when it meant family.

I determined to make my peace with Islam, even at the cost of my pride. Those who were surprised and displeased by what I did perhaps failed to see that... I wanted to make peace between the warring halves of the world, which were also the warring halves of my soul.