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
It matters, it always matters, to name rubbish as rubbish … to do otherwise is to legitimize it.
God, Satan, Paradise, and Hell all vanished one day in my fifteenth year, when I quite abruptly lost my faith. … and afterwards, to prove my new-found atheism, I bought myself a rather tasteless ham sandwich, and so partook for the first time of the forbidden flesh of the swine. No thunderbolt arrived to strike me down. … From that day to this I have thought of myself as a wholly secular person.
The responsibility for violence lies with those who perpetrate it.
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.
I don't think there is a need for an entity like God in my life.
I do not envy people who think they have a complete explanation of the world, for the simple reason that they are obviously wrong.
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.
— Salman Rushdie
Literature
The only people who see the whole picture are the ones who step outside the frame.
— Salman Rushdie
Creativity