'Be Brutal Towards Ideas, Courteous Towards People Who Hold Them'

"I think comedy is the most serious thing in the world and consequently gets up people's noses the farthest. I've always made people mad."

"Nobody has ever asked me what kind of degree I got or even if I've got one at all. I'll have to tell you it's been useless."

"[Attending college in the mid-60s was] the best three or four years in the history of the world to go to college. So many of us inhaled, except for one American president."

"The thing I learned most at Cambridge was that you should be as brutal as possible toward ideas but as courteous as possible to the people who hold them. It is entirely proper that people not be discriminated against, whatever damn fool thing they believe. That doesn't mean we can't say what horseshit it is."

- From a "disarming, whimsical, sometimes profane and provocative encounter" with Sir Salman. (By the way, "Rushdie said he will deliver a new book to his publisher this fall for spring publication.The Enchantress of Florence is a historical novel about a 16th century Mogul Indian princess who finds herself in Renaissance Italy.")