Salman Rushdie

When you're whirling free of the mother ship, when you cut your ropes, slip your chain, step off the map, go absent without leave, scram, vamoose, whatever; suppose that it's then, and only then, that you're actually free to act! To lead the life nobody tells you how to live, or when, or why. In which nobody orders you to go forth and die for them, or for god, or comes to get you because you broke one of the rules, or because you're one of the people who are, for reasons which unfortunately you can't be given, simply not allowed. Suppose you've got to go through the feeling of being lost, into the chaos and beyond; you've got to accept the loneliness, the wild panic of losing your moorings, the vertiginous terror of the horizon spinning round and round like the edge of a coin tossed in the air.

"Our lives teach us who we are." I have learned the hard way that when you permit anyone else's description of reality to supplant your own ... then you might as well be dead.

A son who will never be older than his motherland - neither older nor younger. There shall be two heads – but you will only see one – there will be knees and a nose, a nose and knees. Newspaper praises him, two mothers raise him! Bicycles love him – but crowds will shove him! Sisters will weep, cobras will creep… Washing will hide him – voices will guide him! Friends will mutilate him – blood will betray him! Spittoons will brain him – doctors will drain him – jungle will claim him – wizards reclaim him! Soldiers will try him – tyrants will fry him… He will have sons without having sons! He will be old before he is old! And he will die before he is dead!

When you’ve fallen from the sky, been abandoned by your friend, suffered police brutality, metamorphosed into a goat, lost your work as well as your wife, learned the power of hatred and regained human shape, what is there left to do but, as you would no doubt phrase it, demand your rights?

What had been (at the beginning) no bigger than a full stop had expanded into a comma, a word, a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter; now it was bursting into more complex developments, becoming, one might say, a book - perhaps an encylopaedia - even a whole language...

How do you defeat terrorism? Don’t be terrorized.

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

Other hurdles were ideological. ‘I’m not fucking fighting to defend women’s right to wear the veil, the hijab, the niqab, whatever,’ she declaimed. ‘All these young women these days who describe the veil as a signifier of their identity. I tell them they are suffering from what that presently unfashionable philosopher Karl Marx would have called false consciousness. In most of the world the veil is not a free choice. Women are forced into invisibility by men. These girls in the West making their quote- unquote free choices are legitimising the oppression of their sisters in the parts of the world where the choice is not free. That’s what I tell them, and they are very shocked. They tell me they find my remarks offensive. I tell them I feel the same way about the veil. It’s exhausting. I’ve become embittered. I just needed to stop.

Obviously, a rigid, blinkered, absolutist world view is the easiest to keep hold of, whereas the fluid, uncertain, metamorphic picture I've always carried about is rather more vulnerable. Yet I must cling with all my might to … my own soul; must hold on to its mischievous, iconoclastic, out-of-step clown-instincts, no matter how great the storm. And if that plunges me into contradiction and paradox, so be it; I've lived in that messy ocean all my life. I've fished in it for my art. This turbulent sea was the sea outside my bedroom window in Bombay. It is the sea by which I was born, and which I carry within me wherever I go.

Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true.

Can one drown in one's element... If fish can drown in water, can human beings suffocate in air?

...in autobiography, as in all literature, what actually happened is less important than what the author can manage to persuade his audience to believe

All names mean something.

Sometimes by a woodland stream he watched the water rush over the pebbled bed, its tiny modulations of bounce and flow. A woman's body was like that. If you watched it carefully enough you could see how it moved to the rhythm of the world, the deep rhythm, the music below the music, the truth below the truth. He believed in this hidden truth the way other men believed in God or love, believed that truth was in fact always hidden, that the apparent, the overt, was invariably a kind of lie.

The world, somebody wrote, is the place we prove real by dying in it.