Too many people had spent too long demonizing or totemizing me to listen seriously to what I had to say.

Why obliterate the exceptional merely in order to make the outstanding look finer than it was?

The history of life was not the bumbling progress - the very English, middle-class progress - Victorian thought had wanted it to be, but violent, a thing of dramatic, cumulative transformations: in the old formulation, more revolution than evolution.

Self-censorship is a lie to yourself; if you are going to be trying to seriously create art, to create literary art, and you decide to hold back, to censor yourself, then you are a fool to yourself and it would be better that you kept your mouth shut and did not speak.

One minute you've got a lucky star watching over you and the next instant it's done a bunk.

The writers of the French enlightenment had deliberately used blasphemy as a weapon, refusing to accept the power of the Church to set limiting points on thought.

The thing that always attracted me to New York was the sense of being in a place where a lot of people had a lot of stories not unlike mine,' Rushdie says. 'Everybody comes from somewhere else. Everyone's got a Polish grandmother, some kind of metamorphosis in their family circumstances. That's a very big thing - the experience of not living where you started.