Great Throughts Treasury

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

"A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return."

"A sigh isn't just a sigh. We inhale the world and breathe out meaning. While we can. While we can."

"After a long, hopeless war, people will settle for peace, at almost any price."

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

"After the eastern tsunami and the western hurricanes, this is not incomprehensible. But the people of Kashmir deserve better than they are getting."

"A poet’s work is to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep."

"Antediluvian, who think of homosexuality as ungodly, who have little time for real freedom of expression, who routinely express anti-Semitic views, and who, in the case of the Muslim Diaspora, are -- it has to be said -- in many ways at odds with the cultures among which they live."

"Always do something impossible right at the beginning of the show?. Swallow a sword, tie yourself in a knot, defy gravity. Do what the audience knows it could never do no matter how hard it tries. After that you'll have them eating out of your hand."

"And now, as if to finish things off, the Himalayan winter is setting in, and the greatest calamity of all may lie ahead of us, not behind,"

"Be sure that you go to the author to get at his meaning, not to find yours."

"Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one."

"But love is what we want, not freedom. Who then is the unluckier man? The beloved, who is given his heart's desire and must for ever after fear its loss, or the free man, with his unlooked-for liberty, naked and alone between the captive armies of the earth?"

"Both are responsible. But I know when I write a book it's my name on the book, so I stand or fall by what I sign. And so must she."

"Children are the vessels into which adults pour their poison."

"Do angels have wings? Can men fly?"

"Doubt, it seems to me, is the central condition of a human being in the twentieth century."

"For many people, I've ceased to be a human being. I've become an issue, a bother, an affair. … And has it really been so long since religions persecuted people, burning them as heretics, drowning them as witches, that you can't recognize religious persecution when you see it? … What is my single life worth? Despair whispers in my ear: Not a lot. But I refuse to give in to despair … because … I know that many people do care, and are appalled by the … upside-down logic of the post-fatwa world, in which a … novelist can be accused of having savaged or mugged a whole community, becoming its tormentor (instead of its … victim) and the scapegoat for … its discontents… . (What minority is smaller and weaker than a minority of one?)"

"Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself."

"Free societies ... are societies in motion, and with motion comes tension, dissent, friction. Free people strike sparks, and those sparks are the best evidence of freedom's existence."

"Freedom to reject is the only freedom."

"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."

"Faith without doubt is addiction."

"For the record, there is a French project to make a theatrical adaptation of The Satanic Verses, so maybe that's a start."

"From such defensive, separated worlds some youngsters have indefensibly stepped across a moral line and taken up their lethal rucksacks, ... The deeper alienations that lead to terrorism may have their roots in these young men's objections to events in Iraq or elsewhere, but the closed communities of some traditional Western Muslims are places in which young men's alienations can easily deepen."

"From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable."

"Fundamentalism isn't about religion, it's about power."

"Go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets. Take a deep breath before you begin talking. Aim for the stars. Keep grinning. Be bloody-minded. Argue with the world. And never forget that writing is as close as we get to keeping a hold on the thousand and one things — childhood, certainties, cities, doubts, dreams, instants, phrases, parents, loves — that go on slipping , like sand, through our fingers."

"God, Satan, Paradise, and Hell all vanished one day in my fifteenth year, when I quite abruptly lost my faith.... 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."

"He was also the most tolerant, open-minded, intellectually generous, nonjudgmental adult that I ever met as a child, ... the spirit of my grandfather came to infuse the spirit of the place."

"Having been borne across the world, we are translated men. It is normally supposed that something always gets lost in translation; I cling, obstinately, to the notion that something can also be gained."

"How does it survive, extreme and dangerous as it is? What compromises, what deals, what betrayals of its secret nature must it make to stave off the wrecking crew, the exterminating angel, the guillotine?"

"How does newness come into the world? How is it born?"

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

"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… .The really important conversations I had in this period were with myself. I said: Salman, you must send a message loud enough to… make ordinary Muslims see that you aren't their enemy, and you must make the West understand a little more of the complexity of Muslim culture … and start thinking a little less stereotypically… . And I said to myself: Admit it, Salman, the Story of Islam has a deeper meaning for you than any of the other grand narratives. Of course you're no mystic, mister… No supernaturalism, no literalist orthodoxies… for you. But 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… reminded myself that I had always argued that it was necessary to develop the nascent concept of the secular Muslim, who, like the secular Jew, affirmed his membership of the culture while being separate from the theology… But, Salman, I told myself, you can't argue from outside the debating chamber. You've got to cross the threshold, go inside the room, and then fight for your humanized, historicized, secularized way of being a Muslim."

"However, in the end, the question [remains]: Why him and not the man standing next to him? Why did this person become a terrorist whereas the person standing next to him, suffering all the same privations, having probably all the same political points of view, did not become a terrorist? The answer to that is an old novelistic answer. The answer to that is character ."

"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."

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

"I came as a writer to be very interested in the questions of the borderlines, of the boundaries, ... Great literature doesn't happen when there is no risk. It happens at the edges."

"I do not need the idea of God to explain the world I live in."

"I don't think there is a need for an entity like God in my life."

"I don't particularly care for that title because nobody elected us. It was a time when something was needed to be done and the plan to offer a haven for threatened writers took hold."

"I hate admitting that my enemies have a point."

"I have a deep feeling for Kashmir, and I just had to write this book, ... [But] it's very hard to write about real events. It becomes unbearable. The challenge in writing this book was: how do you write about these things bearably without sweetening the pill?"

"I haven't seen the book, I have seen the passages that were compared between the two books, I must say I don't accept the idea that this could have been accidentally or innocently done. The passages are too many and the similarities are too extensive."

"I make no complaint. I am a writer. I do not accept my condition; I will strive to change it; but I inhabit it, I am trying to learn from it."

"I thought, why am I crying about these characters: I made them up!"

"I reluctantly concluded that there was no way for me to help bring into being the Muslim culture I'd dreamed of, the progressive, irreverent, skeptical, argumentative, playful and unafraid culture which is what I've always understood as freedom. … Actually Existing Islam … which makes literalism a weapon and redescription a crime, will never let the likes of me in."

"I think it's a stupid way to read a book... to say that because something happens to one person the author is trying to suggest that all people are like this. The novel is the art of the particular. And I'm talking about a particular person whose development from innocence to guilt, if you like, is his own particular narrative arc. The point is to make that coherent - not to read the book as some kind of simple allegory, but to read it as a story about a person."

"I used to say, 'There is a God-shaped hole in me.' For a long time I stressed the absence, the hole. Now I find it is the shape which has become more important."