Nobody has the right to not be offended. That right doesn't exist in any declaration I have ever read.

If you are offended it is your problem, and frankly lots of things offend lots of people.

I can walk into a bookshop and point out a number of books that I find very unattractive in what they say. But it doesn't occur to me to burn the bookshop down. If you don't like a book, read another book. If you start reading a book and you decide you don't like it, nobody is telling you to finish it.

To read a 600-page novel and then say that it has deeply offended you: well, you have done a lot of work to be offended.


Salman Rushdie

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SALMAN RUSHDIE
It's Kennedy's war, Vietnam. Lyndon Johnson got all the flak, but it's Kennedy's war...
SALMAN RUSHDIE
And now, as if to finish things off, the Himalayan winter is setting in, and the greatest calamity o...
SALMAN RUSHDIE
As a writer, one of the things we all learned from the movies was a kind of compression that didn...
SALMAN RUSHDIE
What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist
SALMAN RUSHDIE
Have you noticed the physical resemblance between Imran Khan and Gaddafi? If you were making a movie...
SALMAN RUSHDIE
Certainly, poverty and economic decline have a lot to do with the so-called rage of Islam. You'v...
SALMAN RUSHDIE
A poet's work is to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shap...
SALMAN RUSHDIE
A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, sha...
SALMAN RUSHDIE
Free societies are societies in motion, and with motion comes friction.
SALMAN RUSHDIE
If you're on a freeway and want to know if you're being followed, what you do is enormously ...
SALMAN RUSHDIE
In the real world, immeasurable hurt is caused by terrorists based in Pakistan who attack countries ...
SALMAN RUSHDIE
When thought becomes excessively painful, action is the finest remedy
SALMAN RUSHDIE
The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because ...
SALMAN RUSHDIE
What I've always tried to find in my books are points at which the private lives of the characte...
SALMAN RUSHDIE
wants the dreadful, wants to stare down the human race's worst-case scenarios.
SALMAN RUSHDIE
Rohinton Mistry's celebrated novel 'Such a Long Journey' was pulled off the syllabus of ...
SALMAN RUSHDIE
Meanwhile, it seems, the world is suffering from compassion fatigue,
SALMAN RUSHDIE
I've never seen anywhere in the world as beautiful as Kashmir. It has something to do with the f...
SALMAN RUSHDIE
The enemy for the fanatic is pleasure, which makes it extremely important to continue to indulge in ...
SALMAN RUSHDIE
Matthew Wiener on 'Mad Men' writes the entire series before they start shooting, and if you ...
SALMAN RUSHDIE
Someone asked me if I was afraid to write my memoirs. I told him: 'We have to stop drawing up ac...
SALMAN RUSHDIE
I only met Margaret Thatcher twice. The thing that I thought about meeting her was how extraordinari...
SALMAN RUSHDIE
A change in direction was required. The story you finished was perhaps never the one you began. Yes!...
SALMAN RUSHDIE
In today's U.S., it's possible for almost anyone - women, gays, African-Americans, Jews - to...
SALMAN RUSHDIE
When 'Midnight's Children' came out, people in the West tended to respond to the fantasy...
SALMAN RUSHDIE
The accidents of my life have given me the ability to make stories in which different parts of the w...
SALMAN RUSHDIE
Sometimes writing a novel is not unlike having a baby. You'd have to ask a female novelist to co...
SALMAN RUSHDIE
I have a deep feeling for Kashmir, and I just had to write this book, ... [But] it's very hard to wr...
SALMAN RUSHDIE
One of the strange things that happens when you publish a book is that you begin ... to see what res...
SALMAN RUSHDIE
The real risks for any artist are taken in pushing the work to the limits of what is possible, in th...
SALMAN RUSHDIE
Most of what matters in your life takes place in your absence.
SALMAN RUSHDIE
Friendships are the family we make - not the one we inherit. I've always been someone to whom fr...
SALMAN RUSHDIE
I didn't want to become some embittered old hack getting his revenge for the rest of my life. An...
SALMAN RUSHDIE
antediluvian, who think of homosexuality as ungodly, who have little time for real freedom of expres...
SALMAN RUSHDIE
Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plaus...
SALMAN RUSHDIE
Religion, a mediaeval form of unreason, when combined with modern weaponry becomes a real threat to ...
SALMAN RUSHDIE
At sixteen, you still think you can escape from your father. You aren't listening to his voice speak...
SALMAN RUSHDIE
There is a widespread difficulty in the Muslim world, which has to do with how the people are taught...
SALMAN RUSHDIE
I remember when I was young, many cities in the Muslim world were cosmopolitan cities with a lot of ...
SALMAN RUSHDIE
There'll be one track that I like and a lot of it that is just wallpaper and sounds the same.
SALMAN RUSHDIE
Our lives, our stories, flowed into one another's, were no longer our own, individual, discrete.
SALMAN RUSHDIE
If I were asked for a one-sentence sound
bite on religion, I would say I was against it.
SALMAN RUSHDIE
I used to write a monthly column for the 'New York Times' syndicate. But I stopped because I...
SALMAN RUSHDIE
If you were an atheist, Birbal," the Emperor challenged his first minister, "what would you say to t...
SALMAN RUSHDIE
It matters, it always matters, to name rubbish as rubbish … to do otherwise is to legitimize it."<...
SALMAN RUSHDIE
One of the things I've learnt is not to depend on there being a woman in your life to make it wo...
SALMAN RUSHDIE
The fundamentalist seeks to bring down a great deal more than buildings. Such people are against, to...
SALMAN RUSHDIE
Repression is a seamless garment; a society which is authoritarian in its social and sexual codes, w...
SALMAN RUSHDIE
When a book leaves its author's desk it changes. Even before anyone has read it, before eyes other t...
SALMAN RUSHDIE
Always do something impossible right at the beginning of the show?. Swallow a sword, tie yourself in...
SALMAN RUSHDIE
I've tried to live without fear. Fear paralyzes you. I've tried to get on with my life.
SALMAN RUSHDIE
I've been gradually reclaiming all kinds of freedoms over these years..,
SALMAN RUSHDIE
Obviously, it is a very great honor and I'm very pleased to have it, and it's very nice to be recogn...
SALMAN RUSHDIE
I think it's a stupid way to read a book, ... to say that because something happens to one person th...
SALMAN RUSHDIE
Life is fury, he'd thought. Fury — sexual, Oedipal, political, magical, brutal — drives us to ou...
SALMAN RUSHDIE
If I were asked for a one-sentence sound bite on religion, I would say I was against it
SALMAN RUSHDIE
Masks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull.
SALMAN RUSHDIE
Nobody ever wanted to go to war, but if a war came your way, it might as well be the right war, abou...
SALMAN RUSHDIE
A question I have often asked is, ‘What would an inoffensive political cartoon look like?’ What ...
SALMAN RUSHDIE
What one writer can make in the solitude of one room is something no power can easily destroy.
SALMAN RUSHDIE
Many of us persons of the tinted persuasion care about human rights and artistic freedom too.
SALMAN RUSHDIE
From such defensive, separated worlds some youngsters have indefensibly stepped across a moral line ...
SALMAN RUSHDIE
Susan Sontag was a great literary artist,"a fearless and original thinker, ever valiant for truth, a...
SALMAN RUSHDIE
However, in the end, the question [remains]: Why him and not the man standing next to him? Why did t...
SALMAN RUSHDIE
The Satanic Verses.
SALMAN RUSHDIE
Rock and roll music - the music of freedom frightens people and unleashes all manner of conservative...
SALMAN RUSHDIE
از همان زمان برمن روشن شد که خانواده به‌طور ضمنی به اصل...
SALMAN RUSHDIE