Top 100 Rushdie Quotes
#1. I was at a party in 1989 and Ian McEwan, Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie were sitting on a sofa wondering where the next generation of great British writers would come from. As we talked, it became clear they had never read a word by me.
Jeanette Winterson
#2. My father decided that he was such a admirer of Ibn Rushd's philosophy, thinking that he changed the family name to Rushdie. I realized why my father was so interested in him, because he was really an incredibly modernizing voice inside our Islamic culture.
Salman Rushdie
#3. One of the reasons my name is Rushdie is that my father was an admirer of Ibn Rush'd, the 12th century Arab philosopher known as Averroes in the West. In his time, he was making the non-literalist case for interpreting the Koran.
Salman Rushdie
#4. I also know Patrick White in Australia, both personally and as a writer, and Salman Rushdie in India.
William Golding
#5. To take a side against Rushdie, or to be neutral and evasive about him in the name of some vaguely sensitive ecumenical conscience, is to stand against those who try to incubate a Reformation in the Muslim world.
Christopher Hitchens
#6. We were created to be fully human - a lifetime effort - and using our minds intelligently and reverently is essential to full humanhood. But Rushdie talks throughout of making something sacred, whereas there is another kind of sacrality that exists of its own right.
Wendy Beckett
#7. Many Scandinavian writers who had made their name in literary fiction felt they wanted to have a go at the crime novel to show they could compete with the best. If Salman Rushdie had been Norwegian, he would definitely have written at least one thriller.
Jo Nesbo
#8. I am called an Islamic fundamentalist by Rushdie. My critics in Pakistan say I am a Zionist agent. I must be doing something right.
Imran Khan
#9. Salman Rushdie, indeed any writer who abuses the prophet or indeed any prophet under Islamic law, the sentence for that is actually death.
Cat Stevens
#10. My position as the best-selling author at E! is secure - unless Salman Rushdie develops a show with them.
Chelsea Handler
#11. Salman Rushdie said, "A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return."
So if someone tells me I've written something that's historically inaccurate, I can just tell them, "Salman Rushdie said I could."
Veronica Bale
#12. When I was starting out, science fiction was a little genre over there, which only a few people read. But now
where are you going to put, for example, Salman Rushdie? Or any of the South American writers? Most people get by calling them magical realists.
Doris Lessing
#14. Rather than go to a demonstration to burn an effigy of the author Salman Rushdie, I would have hoped that it'd be the real thing.
Cat Stevens
#15. The difference between memoir and autobiography, as far as I see it, is that a memoir is there primarily to tell one particular story, whereas an autobiography tries to be a full account of a life.
Salman Rushdie
#16. England in a way is lucky. It's an island, so the frontiers are given by the sea.
Salman Rushdie
#17. The Koran was revealed at a time of great change in the Arab world, the seventh-century shift from a matriarchal nomadic culture to an urban patriarchal system.
Salman Rushdie
#18. To know one man's story you have to swallow the world.
Salman Rushdie
#19. To respect Louis Farrakhan, we must understand, is simply to agree with him ... If dissent is now also to be thought of as a form of 'dissing,' then we have indeed succumbed to the thought police.
Salman Rushdie
#20. 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
#21. You don't fight radical conservatism with not-quite-so radical conservatism.
Salman Rushdie
#22. All over India policemen were arresting people, all opposition leaders except members of the pro-Moscow Communists, and also schoolteachers lawyers poets newspapermen trade-unionists, in fact anyone who had ever made the mistake of sneezing during the Madam's speeches,
Salman Rushdie
#24. 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
#25. I accept there are people out there who don't like me. I don't like them.
Salman Rushdie
#26. Ormus liked to compose his own songs up on the flat roof of the apartment block, and spent eternities up there, lost within himself, searching for the points at which his inner life intersected the life of the greater world outside, and calling those points of intersection songs.
Salman Rushdie
#27. I have always thought, the secret purpose of the book tour is to make the writer hate the book he's written. And, as a result, drive him to write another book.
Salman Rushdie
#28. Don't you know girls have to fool people every day of their lives if they want to get anywhere?
Salman Rushdie
#29. Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true.
Salman Rushdie
#30. I think the business of writing a great deal of it is the business of paying attention to your characters, to the world they live in, to the story you have to tell, but just a kind of deep attention and out of that if you pay attention properly the story will tell you what it needs.
Salman Rushdie
#31. Sometimes we feel we straddle two cultures; at other times, that we fall between two stools.
Salman Rushdie
#32. If you live in the twentieth century you do not find it hard to see yourself in those, more desperate than yourself, who seek to shape it to their will.
Salman Rushdie
#33. Do not contemplate what lies beyond failure while you are still trying to succeed.
Salman Rushdie
#34. In the experience of art, time seems not to exist.
Salman Rushdie
#35. India, the new myth
a collective fiction in which anything was possible, a fable rivalled only by the two other mighty fantasies: money and God.
Salman Rushdie
#36. Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.
Salman Rushdie
#37. Speaking as somebody with three sisters and a very largely female Muslim family, there is not a single woman I know in my family or in their friends who would have accepted the wearing of a veil.
Salman Rushdie
#38. 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
#39. I would argue that religion comes from a desire to get to the questions of, 'Where do we come from?' and 'How shall we live?' And I would say I don't need religion to answer those questions.
Salman Rushdie
#40. I've been worrying about God a little bit lately ... It seems like he's been in a bad mood. And I think it has to do with the quality of lovers he's been getting.
Salman Rushdie
#41. The publishing of a book is a worldwide event. The attempt to suppress a book is a worldwide event.
Salman Rushdie
#42. The world is not ideas, rich kid, the world is things. If you have things, you have time to dream, if you don't ... You'll fight.
Salman Rushdie
#44. Not even the visionary or mystical experience ever lasts very long. It is for art to capture that experience, to offer it to, in the case of literature, its readers; to be, for a secular, materialist culture, some sort of replacement for what the love of god offers in the world of faith.
Salman Rushdie
#45. The curse of the human race is not that we are so different from one another, but that we are so alike.
Salman Rushdie
#46. But what I learned from the Widow's Hand is that whose who would be gods fear no one so much as other potential deities
Salman Rushdie
#47. There is no bitterness like that of man who finds out he has been believing in a ghost.
Salman Rushdie
#48. I do not envy people who think they have a complete explanation of the world, for the simple reason that they are obviously wrong.
Salman Rushdie
#49. Matthew Wiener on 'Mad Men' writes the entire series before they start shooting, and if you have that, then what you can do with character and story is not at all unlike what you can do in a novel.
Salman Rushdie
#50. If we can cease envisaging ourselves as metaphorical foetuses, and substitute the image of a newborn child, then that will be at least a small intellectual advance. In time, perhaps, we may even learn to toddle.
Salman Rushdie
#51. He returned to Cambridge feeling, at the ripe old age of twenty, that life was passing him by.
Salman Rushdie
#52. In the real world, immeasurable hurt is caused by terrorists based in Pakistan who attack countries like India.
Salman Rushdie
#53. Easily found, easily gathered, lives were the small change of this world, and if you lost a few, it didn't matter; there were always more.
Salman Rushdie
#54. taking his lead from Beckett's mighty Unnamable. I can't go on. I'll go on.
Salman Rushdie
#56. 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
#57. When you are making an independent film, money is never an issue.
Salman Rushdie
#58. You never know the answers to the questions of life until you are asked.
Salman Rushdie
#59. Mo Yan is the Chinese equivalent of the Soviet Russian apparatchik writer Mikhail Sholokhov: a patsy of the regime.
Salman Rushdie
#60. It's true that the human body is more vulnerable than the products of the human mind.
Salman Rushdie
#61. Writers shouldn't have lives that are interesting. It gets in the way of your work.
Salman Rushdie
#62. Fifteen years old! Okay, okay. In our part of the world that's not so young.
Salman Rushdie
#63. In the cookie of life, friends are the chocolate chips.
Salman Rushdie
#64. To reflect is to regain a little, lost sense of proportion
Salman Rushdie
#65. 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
#66. My first novel - the novel I wrote before 'Midnight's Children' - feels, to me, now, very - I mean, I get embarrassed when I see people reading it. You know, there are some people who, bizarrely, like it. Which I'm, you know, I'm happy for.
Salman Rushdie
#67. 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
#68. She saw him fracture into rainbow colors through the prism of her love.
Salman Rushdie
#69. They feared her [the dream beloved], knowing that, being impossible, she was irresistable, and that was why the king loved her best.
Salman Rushdie
#70. For an instant, silence, noisier than a waterfall.
Salman Rushdie
#71. 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
#73. But there's one thing we must all be clear about: terrorism is not the pursuit of legitimate goals by some sort of illegitimate means. Whatever the murderers may be trying to achieve, creating a better world certainly isn't one of their goals. Instead they are out to murder innocent people.
Salman Rushdie
#74. When you throw everything up in the air anything becomes possible.
Salman Rushdie
#75. Ignorantly is how we all fall in love; for it is a kind of fall. Closing our eyes, we leap from that cliff in hope of a soft landing. Nor is it always soft; but still, without that leap nobody comes to life.
Salman Rushdie
#76. The Republicans were not always insane. They might've had politics I didn't agree with, but they weren't always actually certifiable.
Salman Rushdie
#77. For, as the myths tell us, it is by defying the gods that human beings have best expressed their humanity.
Salman Rushdie
#80. Discovery is fun. I am incredibly open to everything.
Salman Rushdie
#81. The glamour of being forbidden must not be underestimated.
Salman Rushdie
#82. When people use the term magic realism, usually they only mean 'magic' and they don't hear 'realism', whereas the way in which magic realism actually works is for the magic to be rooted in the real. It's both things. It's not just a fairytale moment. It's the surrealism that arises out of the real.
Salman Rushdie
#83. If love is a yearning to be like (even to become) the beloved, then hatred, it must be said, can be engendered by the same ambition, when it cannot be fulfilled.
Salman Rushdie
#84. Music, love, death. Certainly a triangle of sorts; maybe even an eternal one.
"The only people who can see the whole picture," he murmured, "are the ones who step out of the frame." (The ground beneath her feet.)
Salman Rushdie
#85. Rani, too, was perpetuating memories. Harappa the martyr, the demigod, lived on in his daughter's thoughts; but no two sets of memories ever match, even when their subject is the same (...)
Salman Rushdie
#86. The Muslim population in India is, largely speaking, not radicalised. From the beginning, they were always very secular-minded.
Salman Rushdie
#87. You can lay your strategies as carefully as you like, but women will undo them at a stroke.
Salman Rushdie
#88. As human knowledge has grown, it has also become plain that every religious story ever told about how we got here is quite simply wrong. This, finally, is what all religions have in common. They didn't get it right.
Salman Rushdie
#89. What happens when you win?
When your enemies are at your mercy: how will you act then? Compromise is the temptation of the weak; this is the test for the strong.
Salman Rushdie
#90. It's one thing to say, 'I don't like what you said to me and I find it rude and offensive,' but the moment you threaten violence in return, you've taken it to another level, where you lose whatever credibility you had.
Salman Rushdie
#91. 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
#92. Mourn for the living, the dead have got their camphor gardens.
Salman Rushdie
#93. So Thomas Pynchon wants a private life and no photographs and nobody to know his home address. I can dig it, I can relate to that (but, like, he should try it when it's compulsory instead of a free-choice option).
Salman Rushdie
#94. There is no such thing as perfect security, only varying levels of insecurity.
Salman Rushdie
#95. No doubt much will be said elsewhere by the armies of bigotry and punditry. Let them volley and thunder. I'll speak of bookish things.
Salman Rushdie
#96. A novel, I think, is partly about the contemporary and partly about the eternal, and it's the balance of that that's difficult to achieve.
Salman Rushdie
#97. adamant. 'They would be the wrong publishers for you.' Later, after
Salman Rushdie
#98. She was my ground, my favorite sound,
my country road, my city street,
my sky above, my only love,
and the ground beneath my feet
Salman Rushdie
#99. It was a rare thing to be granted one's heart's desire.
Salman Rushdie
#100. When they saw the host of chameleon butterflies and the way they both clothed the girl Ayesha and provided her with her only solid food, these visitors were amazed, and retreated with confounded expectations, that is to say with a hole in their pictures of the world that they could not paper over.
Salman Rushdie
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