Top 100 Salman Rushdie Quotes
#1. Knowledge was never simply born in the human mind; it was always reborn. The relaying of wisdom from one age to the next, this cycle of rebirths: this was wisdom.
Salman Rushdie
#2. You don't fight radical conservatism with not-quite-so radical conservatism.
Salman Rushdie
#3. This is known, and what is not known does not undermine it. This is the scientific way. To be open about the limits of one's knowledge increases public confidence in what one says is known.
Salman Rushdie
#4. These stories become what we know, what we understand, and what we are, or, perhaps we should say, what we have become, or can perhaps be.
Salman Rushdie
#5. This is going to make me sound ancient, but I remember Juhu Beach when there weren't any buildings on it. You'd go through countryside and arrive at this amazing beach. I remember driving from Delhi to the Qutab Minar through countryside. Mehrauli was a little village - that's all gone.
Salman Rushdie
#6. Religion was the glue of Pakistan, holding the halves together; just as consciousness, the awareness of oneself as a homogenous entity in time, a blend of past and present, is the glue of personality, holding together our then and our now.
Salman Rushdie
#7. I know that when people pull apart, they usually employ misunderstanding as a weapon, deliberately getting hold of the stick's wrong end, impaling themselves on its point in order to prove the perfidy of the other.
Salman Rushdie
#8. I don't read my books, I write them. Once I've finished the many years it usually takes me to write them, I can't bear to read them, because I've spent too long with them already. I'm not advertising them very well, am I?
Salman Rushdie
#9. When you throw everything up in the air anything becomes possible.
Salman Rushdie
#10. Discovery is fun. I am incredibly open to everything.
Salman Rushdie
#11. The Muslim population in India is, largely speaking, not radicalised. From the beginning, they were always very secular-minded.
Salman Rushdie
#12. We must agree on what matters: kissing in public places, bacon sandwiches, disagreement, cutting-edge fashion, literature, generosity, water, a more equitable distribution of the world's resources, movies, music, freedom of thought, beauty, love.
Salman Rushdie
#13. adamant. 'They would be the wrong publishers for you.' Later, after
Salman Rushdie
#14. There are two things in Indian history - one is the incredible optimism and potential of the place, and the other is the betrayal of that potential - for example, corruption. Those two strands intertwine through the whole of Indian history, and maybe not just Indian history.
Salman Rushdie
#15. Very often, people who actually pick up a book of mine for the first time are kind of surprised. And I get these letters saying, well, who knew that you were good, you know?
Salman Rushdie
#16. It is very, very easy not to be offended by a book. You just have to shut it.
Salman Rushdie
#17. Once you have been in an earthquake you know, even if you survive without a scratch, that like a stroke in the heart, it remains in the earth's breast, horribly potential, always promising to return, to hit you again, with an even more devastating force.
Salman Rushdie
#18. In television, the 60-minute series, 'The Wire' and 'Mad Men' and so on, the writer is the primary creative artist.
Salman Rushdie
#19. A little bird whispers in my ear: Be fair! Nobody, no country, has a monopoly of untruth.
Salman Rushdie
#20. One of the extraordinary things about human events is that the unthinkable becomes thinkable.
Salman Rushdie
#21. I have been so-many too-many persons; life, unlike syntax, allows one more than three.
Salman Rushdie
#23. We who have grown up on a diet of honour and shame can still grasp what must seem unthinkable to people living in the aftermath of the death of God and of tragedy: that men will sacrifice their dearest love on the implacable altars of their pride.
Salman Rushdie
#24. She watched him recede into the past as he stood ... each successive moment of him passing before her eyes and being lost forever.
Salman Rushdie
#25. Our lives disconnect and reconnect, we move on, and later we may again touch one another, again bounce away. This is the felt shape of a human life, neither simply linear nor wholly disjunctive nor endlessly bifurcating, but rather this bouncey-castle sequence of bumpings-into and tumblings-apart.
Salman Rushdie
#26. Sometimes you find your voice by trying to write like people, and sometimes you find it by trying to write unlike people.
Salman Rushdie
#27. Dissensions between Muslim nations run at least as deep, if not deeper, than those nations' resentment of the West.
Salman Rushdie
#29. In the '50s, listening to Elvis and others on the radio in Bombay - it didn't feel alien. Noises made by a truck driver from Tupelo, Mississippi, seemed relevant to a middle-class kid growing up on the other side of the world. That has always fascinated me.
Salman Rushdie
#30. The First Amendment defends all forms of speech including hate speech, which is why groups like Ku Klux Klan are allowed to utter their poisonous remarks.
Salman Rushdie
#31. People would come and threaten them. And they would respond by putting the book in the window. Behind that, the publishers, many of whom were menaced and receiving anonymous phone calls of the very menacing kind and so, almost everybody - not everybody, but almost everybody held the line.
Salman Rushdie
#32. Two things form the bedrock of any open society - freedom of expression and rule of law. If you don't have those things, you don't have a free country.
Salman Rushdie
#33. If you have children, you worry about the world you're leaving them.
Salman Rushdie
#34. So India's problem turns out to be the world's problem. What happened in India has happened in God's name.
The problem's name is God.
Salman Rushdie
#35. YouTube is full of pieces of trash. If you want to look on YouTube and find something that insults you, you can probably find it.
Salman Rushdie
#36. Shah Ismail had fallen victim to the rarely used, great Uzbek anti-Shiite potato and sturgeon curse, which required quantities of potatoes and caviar which were not easy to amass, and a unity of purpose among the Sunni witches which was likewise difficult to achieve.
Salman Rushdie
#37. I do think there was a period there when my sanity was under intense pressure, and I didn't know what to say or do or how to act. I was literally living from day to day.
Salman Rushdie
#38. I do think of Bombay as my hometown. Those are the streets I walked when I was learning to walk. And it's the place that my imagination has returned to more than anywhere else.
Salman Rushdie
#39. If there is a choice between absolute safety and freedom, then freedom must always prevail.
Salman Rushdie
#41. When we stop believing in the gods we can start believing in their stories.
Salman Rushdie
#42. This unhoused, exiled Satan was perhaps the heavenly patron of all exiles, all unhoused people, all those who were torn from their place and left floating, half-this, half-that, denied the rooted person's comforting, defining sense of having solid ground beneath their feet.
Salman Rushdie
#43. When he was young, he told her, each phase of his life, each self he tried on, had seemed reassuringly temporary. Its imperfections didn't matter, because he could easily replace one moment by the next, one Saladin by another.
Salman Rushdie
#44. I for one don't need a supreme "sacred" arbiter in order to be a moral being.
Salman Rushdie
#45. Because silence, too, has an echo, hollower and longer-lasting than the reverberations of any sound.
Salman Rushdie
#46. The miniatures of the Mughal period are really the pinnacle of Indian artistic achievement. And not a single one of those paintings is done by an individual artist.
Salman Rushdie
#47. I think that England made a very big, historical mistake to allow itself to become the kind of terrorist capital of the world.
Salman Rushdie
#49. The West was involved in toppling the Mossadegh government. That ultimately led to the Iranian revolution.
Salman Rushdie
#50. Not all possibilities are open to us. The world is finite; our hopes spill over its rim.
Salman Rushdie
#51. Religion, a medieval form of unreason, when combined with modern weaponry becomes a real threat to our freedoms. This religious totalitarianism has caused a deadly mutation in the heart of Islam and we see the tragic consequences in Paris today.
Salman Rushdie
#52. Make as much racket as you like people. Noise is life and an excess of noise is a sign that life is good. There will be time for us all to be quiet when we are safely dead.
Salman Rushdie
#53. Well, there they were, the masters of the earth, canned like tuna on wheels and blind as bats, their heads full of mischief and their newspapers of blood.
Salman Rushdie
#54. No, I don't think it's fair to label Islam 'violent.' But I will say that to my knowledge, no writer has ever gone into hiding for criticizing the Amish.
Salman Rushdie
#55. I've never rejected the world I came from. To be rejected by it is horrible.
Salman Rushdie
#56. The response of anybody interested in liberty is that we all have a say and the ability to have an argument is exactly what liberty is, even though it may never be resolved. In any authoritarian society the possessor of power dictates, and if you try and step outside he will come after you.
Salman Rushdie
#57. Mr. Gibreel Farishta on the railway to London was once again seized as who would not be by the fear that God had decided to punish him for his loss of faith by driving him insane.
Salman Rushdie
#59. Before I came to England, my favorite authors were P. G. Wodehouse and Agatha Christie. I used to devour both.
Salman Rushdie
#60. The USA approach looks like bullying because it is.
Salman Rushdie
#61. If there were Israeli attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities, it makes it certain there would be a reprisal attack against the United States at some point.
Salman Rushdie
#62. All true believers have good reasons for disbelieving in every god except their own,' said Birbal, 'and so it is they who, between them, give me all the reasons for believing in none.
Salman Rushdie
#63. If my child had prejudice in his head, I'd be ashamed. I would see it as my failure as a parent.
Salman Rushdie
#64. Most American writers don't get asked their opinion on current affairs, whereas in Europe and England, we still do. There are writers here who are the most sophisticated commentators, but they're not asked. Like Don DeLillo, who sort of forecast most of the modern world before it happened.
Salman Rushdie
#65. English, no longer, an English language, now grows from many roots.
Salman Rushdie
#66. My friend Lou Reed came to the end of his song. So very sad.But hey, Lou, you'll always take a walk on the wild side. Always a perfect day.
Salman Rushdie
#68. If a birth is the fall-out from the explosion caused by the union of two unstable elements, then perhaps a half-life is all we can expect.
Salman Rushdie
#69. I have to say that after some initial resistance, I'm now a complete 'Game of Thrones' addict.
Salman Rushdie
#70. Then how unconfident of Itself this Deity was, Who didn't want Its finest creations to know right from wrong; and Who reigned by terror, insisting upon the unqualified submission of even Its closest associates, packing off all dissidents to Its blazing Siberias, the gulag-infernos of Hell ...
Salman Rushdie
#72. Every time you finish a book, you have a terrible feeling that there's just never going to be another one. But fortunately, so far, the next one has always shown up.
Salman Rushdie
#73. One of the things I've learnt is not to depend on there being a woman in your life to make it work. I love my work, I love my children, I've got wonderful friends, you know, I have a nice life.
Salman Rushdie
#74. There is a point beyond which conciliation looks like capitulation. I do not believe I passed that point, but others have thought otherwise.
Salman Rushdie
#75. When 'Midnight's Children' came out, people in the West tended to respond to the fantasy elements in the novel, to praise it in those terms. In India, people read it like a history book.
Salman Rushdie
#76. It feels as if half your life is a sort of struggle toward the sunlight. Then you get five minutes in the sun and after that you're dragged down into the darkness again
Salman Rushdie
#77. I've never read anything so badly written that got published. It made 'Twilight' look like 'War and Peace.'
Salman Rushdie
#78. When you know what you're against you have taken the first step to discovering what you're for.
Salman Rushdie
#79. No people whose word for 'yesterday' is the same as their word for 'tomorrow' can be said to have a firm grip on the time.
Salman Rushdie
#80. It was always women who did the choosing, and men's place was to be grateful if they were lucky enough to be the chosen ones. Joseph Anton
Salman Rushdie
#81. Can one drown in one's element ... If fish can drown in water, can human beings suffocate in air?
Salman Rushdie
#82. Nobody can judge an internal injury by the size of the superficial wound.
Salman Rushdie
#83. Happy endings must come at the end of something,' the Walrus pointed out. 'If they happen in the middle of a story, or an adventure, or the like, all they do is cheer things up for awhile.
Salman Rushdie
#84. Faced with the possibility that evil existed, that pure malevolence had walked into my life and convinced me it was love, faced with the loss of everything I wanted from my life, I fainted. And dreamed dark dreams of blood.
Salman Rushdie
#85. Something was badly amiss with the spiritual life of the planet ... Too many demons inside people claiming to believe in God.
Salman Rushdie
#86. You be respectable, sister," she said, "Me, I'll be alive.
Salman Rushdie
#87. Everybody loves 'The Wire,' and I think it's okay, but in the end it's just a police series.
Salman Rushdie
#88. In today's U.S., it's possible for almost anyone - women, gays, African-Americans, Jews - to run for, and be elected to, high office.
Salman Rushdie
#89. One either loves, or waits for love, or banishes love for good. That is the full range of possible choices.
Salman Rushdie
#90. I don't like books that play to the gallery, but I've become more concerned with telling a story as clearly and engagingly as I can.
Salman Rushdie
#91. Religion is responsible for a lot of the problems in the history of the world and it's not something that I practice or recommend, but to each his own.
Salman Rushdie
#92. Hyperrealism can create an atmosphere of surrealism because nobody sees the world in such detail.
Salman Rushdie
#93. I allowed myself the supernatural, the transcendent, because, I told myself, our love of metaphor is pre-religious, born of our need to express what is inexpressible, our dreams of otherness, of more.
Salman Rushdie
#94. Most of what matters in your life takes place in your absence.
Salman Rushdie
#95. An eighteen-year age gap had turned out to be a good place to dump most of the problems that can sometimes crop up between brothers,
Salman Rushdie
#96. Proving once again that there was no escape from recurrence.
Salman Rushdie
#97. One of the problems with defending free speech is you often have to defend people that you find to be outrageous and unpleasant and disgusting.
Salman Rushdie
#98. It's always been colossally important to me that my books should be well received in India. It's where I come from.
Salman Rushdie
#99. One of the things I've thought about 'Midnight's Children' is that it is a novel which puts a Muslim family at the centre of the Indian experience.
Salman Rushdie
#100. How young he was when he made the surprisingly adult resolution to escape from the unpalatable reality of dreams into the slightly more acceptable illusions of his everyday, walking life!
Salman Rushdie
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
