Salman Rushdie Quotes & Sayings

Any story worth its salt can handle a little shaking up. — Salman Rushdie

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

As a writer, one of the things we all learned from the movies was a kind of compression that didn't exist before people were used to watching films. For instance, if you wanted to write a flashback in a novel, you once had to really contextualize it a lot, to set it up. Now, readers know exactly what you're doing. Close-ups, too. — Salman Rushdie

Anything you want to be, you can be:
You can be just what-all you want. — Salman Rushdie

British society has never been cleansed of the filth of imperialism. — Salman Rushdie

Because I've always felt, whether the fatwa or whatever, the writer's great weapon is the truth and integrity of his voice. And as long as what you're saying is what you truly, honestly believe to be the case, then whatever the consequences, that's fine. That's an honorable position. — Salman Rushdie

We all owe death a life. — Salman Rushdie

In the end, you write the book that grabs you by the throat and demands to be written. — Salman Rushdie

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

Ideas are interesting to me, and religions are a place where ideas have been very subtly embodied for thousands of years. All literature started as sacred literature. — Salman Rushdie

This is how religions shore up dictators; by encircling them with words of power, words which the people are reluctant to see discredited, disenfranchised, mocked. — Salman Rushdie

It was, for him, an object lesson in the importance of the "better out than in" free speech argument - that it was better to allow even the most reprehensible speech than to sweep it under the carpet, better to publicly contest and perhaps deride what was loathsome than to give it the glamour of taboo, and that, for the most part, people could be trusted to tell the good from the bad. — Salman Rushdie

Tragedy happens - "tragic mistakes" happen - when men act according to their flawed natures, in fulfillment of their preordained destinies. The tragedy of the four killers of Amadou Diallo is that their deeds were made possible by their general preconceptions about black people and poor neighborhoods; by a theory of policing that encourages them to be rigid and punitive toward petty offenders; and by a social context in which the possession and use of firearms is so normative as to be almost beyond discussion. The tragedy of the street vendor Amadou Diallo is that he came as an innocent to the slaughter, made vulnerable by poverty and by the color of his skin. And the tragedy of America is that a nation which sees itself as leading the world toward a global future in which the American values of freedom and justice will be available for everyone fails so frequently and so badly to guarantee that freedom and that justice for so many people within its own frontiers. — Salman Rushdie

If I were asked for a one-sentence sound
bite on religion, I would say I was against it. — Salman Rushdie

I grew up falling in love with kind of story, amazing, wonder tale of the East, which if you're a child growing up in India is all around you.And I think one of the gifts it gave me as a writer was this early knowledge that stories are not true. — Salman Rushdie

Tai tapped his left nostril. 'You know what this is, Nakkoo? It's the place where the outside world meets the world inside you. — Salman Rushdie

I'd rather die fighting over great poets than over gods. — Salman Rushdie

Vertigo is the conflict between the fear of falling and the desire to fall. — Salman Rushdie

I saw Quentin Tarantino's 'Django Unchained,' and you could say a lot of things against it, but it was incredible fun. I don't like blood and gore, and I am very squeamish about violence, but Tarantino's violence is actually funny. — Salman Rushdie

When we stop believing in the gods we can start believing in their stories. — Salman Rushdie

Prejudice, mostly,' Allie said, lying curled around Gibreel beneath parachute silk. 'They can't quantify the will, so they leave it out of their calculations. But it's will that gets you up Everest, will and anger, and it can bend any law of nature you care to mention, at least in the short term, gravity not excluded. If you don't push your luck, anyway. — Salman Rushdie

Burn the books and trust the Book; shred the papers and hear the Word. — Salman Rushdie

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

I write books I'd enjoy reading, I'm the reader standing behind my shoulder. — Salman Rushdie

The key to writing is concentration, not inspiration. It requires deep attention to your characters, to the world they live in, and to the story you have to tell. — Salman Rushdie

She'd never shaken off the feeling of being damaged by her ignorance of Love, of what it might be like to be wholly possessed by the archetypal, capitalized djinn, the yearning towards, the blurring of the boundaries of the self, the unbuttoning, until you were open from your adam's-apple to your crotch: just words, because she didn't know the thing. — Salman Rushdie

Who what am I? My answer: I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I've gone which would not have happened if I had not come. Nor am I particularly exceptional in this matter; each "I", everyone of the now-six-hundred-million-plus of us, contains a similar multitude. I repeat for the last time: to understand me, you'll have to swallow a world. — Salman Rushdie

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

Literature is the one place in any society where, within the secrecy of our own heads, we can hear voices talking about everything in every possible way. The reason for ensuring that that privileged arena is preserved is not that writers want the absolute freedom to say and do whatever they please. It is that we, all of us, readers and writers and citizens and generals and goodmen, need that little, unimportant-looking room. We do not need to call it sacred, but we do need to remember that it is necessary — Salman Rushdie

I have always thought that these two ways of talking, one is the fantastic, the fable, the fairy tale, and the other being history, the scholarly study of what happened, I think they're both amazing ways to understand human nature. — Salman Rushdie

Human life was rarely shapely, only intermittently meaningful, its clumsiness the inevitable consequence of the victory of content over form, of what and when over how and why. — Salman Rushdie

I didn't become a writer to write about me. — Salman Rushdie

The liveliness of literature lies in its exceptionality, in being the individual, idiosyncratic vision of one human being, in which, to our delight and great surprise, we may find our own vision reflected. — Salman Rushdie

Paul Theroux was sitting in the pew (at Bruce Chatwin's memorial service) behind him. "I suppose we'll be here for you next week, Salman," he said. — Salman Rushdie

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

I discovered that if you find the language to talk to younger readers, children can accept anything. — Salman Rushdie

Nobody wants to read a 600 page book in which the author is fabulous throughout. — Salman Rushdie

Sometimes great, banned works defy the censor's description and impose themselves on the world - 'Ulysses,' 'Lolita,' the 'Arabian Nights.' — Salman Rushdie

One Kashmiri morning in the early spring of 1915, my grandfather Aadam Aziz hit his nose against a frost-hardened tussock of earth while attempting to pray. Three drops of blood plopped out of his left nostril, hardened instantly in the brittle air and lay before his eyes on the prayer-mat, transformed into rubies. Lurching back until he knelt with his head once more upright, he found that the tears which had sprung to his eyes had solidified, too; and at that moment, as he brushed diamonds contemptuously from his lashes, he resolved never again to kiss earth for any god or man. This decision, however, made a hole in him, a vacancy in a vital inner chamber, leaving him vulnerable to women and history. Unaware of this at first, despite his recently completed medical training, he stood up, rolled the prayer-mat into a thick cheroot, and holding it under his right arm surveyed the valley through clear, diamond-free eyes. — Salman Rushdie

Once before, my daughter,' she said, ignoring Ahmed's continuing ravings, 'your father and I,
whatsitsname, said there was no shame in leaving an inadequate husband. Now I say again: you have, whatsitsname, a man of unspeakable vileness. Go from him; go today, and take your children, whatsitsname, away from these oaths which he spews from his lips like an animal, whatsitsname, of the gutter. Take your children, I say, whatsitsname-both your children,' she said, clutching me to her bosom. — Salman Rushdie

In the cookie of life, friends are the chocolate chips. — Salman Rushdie

Even if Shaheed had been able to hear me, I could not then have told him what I later became convinced was the truth: that the purpose of that entire war had been to reunite me with an old life, to bring me back together with my old friends. Sam Manekshaw was marching on Dacca, to meet his old friend the Tiger; and the modes of connection lingered on, because on the field of leaking bone-marrow I heard about the exploits of knees, and was greeted by a dying pyramid of heads; and in Dacca I was to meet Parvati-the-witch. — Salman Rushdie

There is a thing that lives in us, eating our food, breathing our air, looking out through our eyes, and when it comes out to play nobody is immune; possessed, we turn murderously upon one another, thing-darkness in our eyes and real weapons in our hands, neighbour against thing-ridden neighbour, thing-driven cousin against cousin, brother-thing against brother-thing, thing-child against thing-child. — Salman Rushdie

Our human tragedy is that we are unable to comprehend our experience, it slips through our fingers, we can't hold on to it, and the more time passes, the harder it gets ... My father said that the natural world gave us explanations to compensate for the meanings we could not grasp. The slant of the cold sunlight on a winter pine, the music of water, an oar cutting the lake and the flight of birds, the mountains' nobility , the silence of the silence. We are given life but must accept that it is unattainable and rejoice in what can be held in the eye, the memory, the mind. — Salman Rushdie

People are always telling me that they've seen people reading my books on the subway, or the beach, or whenever. — Salman Rushdie

Why is that fairy-tales always treat marriage as an ending? And always such a perfectly happy one? — Salman Rushdie

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

Once the god-squaddie supreme, she was now possessed of the zeal of the apostate and came on like an atheistic stormtrooper. — Salman Rushdie

but something was given in exchange for what was lost — Salman Rushdie

Between the self and the other, between the visionary and the psychopath, between the lover and his love, between the overworld and the underworld, falls the Shadow. — Salman Rushdie

The Chinese are good at repression and can be pretty ruthless about it. — Salman Rushdie

When you have children, your perspective on the parent-child relationship alters. — Salman Rushdie

By the end of the Latin lesson he was a hard-line atheist, and to prove it, he marched determinedly into the school tuckshop during break and bought himself a ham sandwich. The flesh of the swine passed his lips for the first time that day, and the failure of the Almighty to strike him dead with a thunderbolt proved to him what he had long suspected: that there was nobody up there with thunderbolts to hurl. — Salman Rushdie

Enough of invisibility, silence, timidity, defensiveness, guilt! An invisible, silenced man was an empty space into which others could pour their prejudices, their agendas, their wrath. The fight against fanaticism needed visible faces, audible voices. He would be quiet no longer. He would try to become a loud and visible man. — Salman Rushdie

It has been observed that all Americans need a frontier: pain was hers, and she was determined to push it out. — Salman Rushdie

In this world without quiet corners, there can be no easy escapes from history, from hullabaloo, from terrible, unquiet fuss. — Salman Rushdie

India's head ached. Insomnia was still her most attentive, cruelest lover, demanding and possessing her selfishly whenever it chose to do so. Light-heartedness was beyond her today. A man of middling quality was trying to marry her, and there was something wrong with her father's voice on the phone. — Salman Rushdie

Vow," he cried, reeling. "It isn't bad enough being a brown dude in America, you're telling me I'm half fucking goblin as well. — Salman Rushdie

There is no alternative to the peaceful coexistence of cultures. — Salman Rushdie

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

When you are writing a book, it feels as if you are simply concentrating on the world of the book and that whatever is happening in your personal life is outside the room, as it were. But maybe that's just the way you have to talk to yourself to make it possible. — Salman Rushdie

He wished he could have roots spreading under every inch of his lost soil, his beloved lost home, that he could have been part of something, that he could have been himself, walking down the road not taken, living a life in context and not the migrant's hollow journey that had been his fate — Salman Rushdie

Islam doesn't have to mean blind faith. It can mean what it always meant in your family, a culture, a civilization, as open-minded as your grandfather was, as delightedly disputatious as your father was ... Don't let the zealots make Muslim a terrifying word, I urged myself; remember when it meant family. — Salman Rushdie

As I look back, I feel a touch of pride at my younger self's dedication to literature, which gave him the strength of mind to resist the blandishments of the enemies of promise. The sirens of ad-land sang sweetly and seductively, but I thought of Odysseus lashing himself to the mast of his ship, and somehow stayed on course. — Salman Rushdie

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

Friendships are the family we make - not the one we inherit. I've always been someone to whom friendship, elective affinities, is as important as family. — Salman Rushdie

It was curious that so avowedly godless a person should keep trying to write about faith. — Salman Rushdie

She climbed on the kitchen table and when he declined to join her she stamped out a pouting solo piece containing equal parts of petulance and release. — Salman Rushdie

Islam is unusual in that it's the only one of the great world religions which was born inside recorded history. That there's an enormous amount of factual historical record about the life of a prophet and about social conditions in Arabia at that time. So it's possible to look at the origin of Islam in a scholarly way. — Salman Rushdie

Rage made you the creature of those who enraged you, it gave them to much power. Rage killed the mind ... — Salman Rushdie

It's obvious that I come down on the side of free speech for anybody's work. — Salman Rushdie

I'm lucky yes I am don't argue I'm the luckiest bastard in the world. And: how wonderful it was to have before him the stretching, shady avenue of years, the prospect of growing old in the presence of her gentleness. — Salman Rushdie

Winner of the "Booker of Bookers," Midnight's Children is the novel that can be said to have done for Indian literature what One Hundred Years of Solitude did for the literature of the Americas, exciting a boom whose echoes have yet to fade. — Salman Rushdie

Women have always moaned about men ... but it turns out that their deepest complaints are reserved for one another, because while they expect men to be fickle, treacherous, and weak, they judge their own sex by higher standards, they expect more from their own sex
loyalty, understanding, trustworthiness, love ... — Salman Rushdie

How to forgive the world for its beauty, which merely disguises its ugliness; for its gentleness, which merely cloaks its cruelty; for its illusion of continuity, seamlessly, as the night follows the day, so to speak- whereas in reality life is a series of brutal raptures, falling upon your defenseless hands, like the blows of a woodman's axe? — Salman Rushdie

It is often said by religious people that without its framework, there is no sense of right or wrong. My view is that religion comes after ethics. — Salman Rushdie

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

Games sometimes require lateral thinking. They sometimes require quite skilled hand-eye coordination and so on. But they're not in any sense intelligent in the way that you want your children to develop intelligence to make the mind not just supple, but actually informed. — Salman Rushdie

Rich kid," Shiva yelled, "you don't know one damn thing! What purpose, man? What thing in the whole sister-sleeping world got reason, yara? For what reason you're rich and I'm poor? Where's the reason in starving, man? God knows how many millions of damn fools living in this country, man, and you think there's a purpose! Man, I'll tell you
you got to get what you can, do what you can with it, and then you got to die. That's reason, rich boy. Everything else is only mother-sleeping wind! — Salman Rushdie

I have been a swallower of lives; and to know me, just the one of me, you'll have to swallow the lot as well. — Salman Rushdie

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

Science fiction is always a vehicle for ideas. It's the form which allows either movies or books to be an exploration of how we should live. — Salman Rushdie

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

The reason why books endure is because there are enough people who like them. It's the only reason why books last. — Salman Rushdie

I make no complaint. I am a writer. I do not accept my condition; I will strive to change it; but I inhabit it, I am trying to learn from it. — Salman Rushdie

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

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

The actor's life offers, on a daily basis, the simulacrum of love; a mask can be satisfied, or at least consoled, by the echo of what it seeks. — Salman Rushdie

The way you write a screenplay is that you close your eyes and run the movie in your head and then you write it down. — Salman Rushdie

Only the foolish, blinded by language's conventions, think of fire as red or gold. Fire is blue at it's melancholy rim, green in it's envious heart. It may burn white, or even, in it's greatest rages, black. — Salman Rushdie

The adult chops down his childhood to help his grown-up self. The unsentimentality is appealing, don't you think? — Salman Rushdie

Trouble in a marriage," he later wrote, "is like monsoon water accumulating on a flat roof. You don't realize it's up there, but it gets heavier and heavier, until one day, with a great crash, the whole roof falls in on your head. — Salman Rushdie

I think the book is less emotional than the film. With the film, the emotions are much more raw and in front. In the book, they are kind of ironized and seen through comedy. — Salman Rushdie

It's true that the human body is more vulnerable than the products of the human mind. — Salman Rushdie

For him, life on earth is just an anteroom, or a doorway. Eternity is the real world. — Salman Rushdie

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

A book is not completed till it's read. — Salman Rushdie

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

The field of the novel is very rich. If you're a composer, you're well aware of the history of composition, and you are trying to make your music part of that history. You're not ahistorical. In the same way, I think, if you write now, you are writing in the historical context of what the novel has been and what possibilities it has revealed. — Salman Rushdie

Nobody noticed or cared that one day she turned sideways and slipped through a slit in the world and returned to Peristan, the other reality, the world of dreams whence the jinn periodically emerge to trouble and bless mankind. To the villagers of Lucena she seemed to have dissolved, perhaps into fireless smoke. After Dunia left our world the voyagers from the world of the jinn to ours became fewer in number, and then for a long time they stopped coming completely, and the slits in the world became overgrown by the unimaginative weeds of convention and the thornbushes of the dully material, until they finally closed up completely and our ancestors were left to do the best they could without the benefits or curses of magic. — Salman Rushdie