If you're going to write a memoir, try to be as honest and open as you can.

History could claw upward as well as down. The powerful could be deafened by the cries of the poor.

One of the reasons my name is Rushdie is that my father was an admirer of Ibn Rush'd, the 12th century Arab philosopher known as Averroes in the West. In his time, he was making the non-literalist case for interpreting the Koran.

Human beings understand themselves and shape their futures by arguing and challenging and questioning and saying the un-sayable, not by bowing the knee whether to gods or to men.

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

Memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else's version more than his own.

perhaps, if one wishes to remain an individual in the midst of the teeming multitudes, one must make oneself grotesque.