Great Throughts Treasury

"We crave permission openly to become our secret selves."

"We must conclude that it is not only a particular political ideology that has failed, but the idea that men and women could ever define themselves in terms that exclude their spiritual needs."

"We are described into corners, and then we must describe ourselves out of corners."

"We are the humbugs now."

"We were language's magpies by nature, stealing whatever sounded bright and shiny."

"What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry."

"What kind of idea are you? Are you the kind that compromises, does deals, accommodates itself to society, aims to find a niche, to survive; or are you the cussed, bloody-minded, ramrod-backed type of damn-fool notion that would rather break than sway with the breeze? — The kind that will almost certainly, ninety-nine times out of hundred, be smashed to bits; but, the hundredth time, will change the world."

"What I was trying to show was the creation of extremely violent individuals from people like you and I... Shalimar was a happy, admired performer whose world was smashed, both inside and out. That double fracture provided the fissure for him to slip through."

"What is needed is a move beyond tradition -- nothing less than a reform movement to bring the core concepts of Islam into the modern age."

"When a reader falls in love with a book, it leaves its essence inside him, like radioactive fallout in an arable field, and after that there are certain crops that will no longer grow in him, while other, stranger, more fantastic growths may occasionally be produced."

"What kind of God is it who's upset by a cartoon in Danish?"

"What's real and what's true aren't necessarily the same."

"What one writer can make in the solitude of one room is something no power can easily destroy."

"When I was growing up, everyone around me was fond of fooling around with words. It was certainly common in my family, but I think it is typical of Bombay, and maybe of India, that there is a sense of play in the way people use language. Most people in India are multilingual, and if you listen to the urban speech patterns there you'll find it's quite characteristic that a sentence will begin in one language, go through a second language and end in a third. It's the very playful, very natural result of juggling languages. You are always reaching for the most appropriate phrase."

"When I finished the book I thought this actually does have echoes for the modern world in all sorts of places, ... The Satanic Verses."

"Whenever someone who knows you disappears, you lose one version of yourself. Yourself as you were seen, as you were judged to be. Lover or enemy, mother or friend, those who know us construct us, and their several knowings slant the different facets of our characters like diamond-cutter's tools. Each such loss is a step leading to the grave, where all versions blend and end."

"When thought becomes excessively painful, action is the finest remedy."

"While they have made some concessions to the West, China's leaders have not shown much interest in freedom of speech."

"Who what am I? My answer: 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. Nor am I particularly exceptional in this matter; each ‘I’, every one of the now-six-hundred-million-plus of us, contains a similar multitude. I repeat for the last time: to understand me, you’ll have to swallow the world."

"Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can't forgive."

"Where there is no belief, there is no blasphemy."

"With death comes honesty."

"Woe to that nation whose literature is cut short by the intrusion of force. This is not merely interference with freedom of the press but the sealing up of a nation's heart, the excision of its memory."

"Why speak if you can't manage perfect thoughts, perfect sentences?"

"Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory."

"You can't judge an internal injury by the size of the hole."

"You can find shame in every house, burning in an ashtray, hanging framed upon a wall, covering a bed. But nobody notices it any more."

"Your blasphemy, Salman, can't be forgiven. To set your words against the Words of God."

"Your songs are your planets. Live on them but make no home there."