"An iceberg is water striving to be land; a mountain, especially a Himalaya, especially Everest, is land's attempt to metamorphose into sky; it is grounded in flight, the earth mutated—nearly—into air, and become, in the true sense, exalted." —Salman Rushdie

"A book is a version of the world.  If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return."
—Salman Rushdie

"Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game.  Free speech is life itself."
—Salman Rushdie

"A poet's work . . . to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep."
—Salman Rushdie

"Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one."
—Salman Rushdie

"Don't be too certain of learning the past from the lips of the present.   Beware of the most honest broker.  Remember that what you are told is really threefold:  shaped by the teller, reshaped by the listener, concealed from both by the dead man of the tale." —Vladimir Nabokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

"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."
—Salman Rushdie

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

"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."
—Salman Rushdie

"I want more than what I want."
—Salman Rushdie

"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."
—Salman Rushdie