Salman Quotes & Sayings

LIFE SHOULD BE ENJOYED UPTO ITS EXTENT. — Salman Akhtar

This strange business of what it is to be a writer is this increasingly insane world in which we live, in which surrealism, it seems, is the new realism. — Salman Rushdie

It is not wise to think of people as either friends or enemies as if you were the center of the universe; many are not aware of your existance! — Salman Al Odah

I have had many more close women friends than men, and I've always assumed that comes from the fact that in my family there was such a disproportionate female element. — Salman Rushdie

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

My grandmother was very fierce and gruff. She was quite small, but she was very wide. — Salman Rushdie

Human beings do not perceive things whole; we are not gods but wounded creatures, cracked lenses, capable only of fractured perceptions — Salman Rushdie

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

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

War used to be something you could stand on the nearby hill and watch. Now we have total war; everybody's in it. We have total economics as well. Everything affects everybody. The Malaysian currency shakes, and people around the world are seriously affected. — Salman Rushdie

A comfortable prison was still a prison. — Salman Rushdie

The Muslim population in India is, largely speaking, not radicalised. From the beginning, they were always very secular-minded. — Salman Rushdie

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

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

PLEASE BELIEVE that I am falling apart. I am not speaking metaphorically; nor is this the opening gambit of some melodramatic, riddling, grubby appeal for pity. I mean quite simply that I have begun to crack all over like an old jug - that my poor body, singular, unlovely, buffeted by too much history, subjected to drainage above and drainage below, mutilated by doors, brained by spittoons, has started coming apart at the seams. In short, I am literally disintegrating, slowly for the moment, although there are signs of acceleration. I ask you only to accept (as I have accepted) that I shall eventually crumble into (approximately) six hundred and thirty million particles of anonymous, and necessarily oblivious, dust. — Salman Rushdie

Boys," I mutter tolerantly across the years to Saleem-at-twenty-four, "will be boys. — Salman Rushdie

There is no bitterness like that of man who finds out he has been believing in a ghost. — Salman Rushdie

Forget the soul. No such ghost in the machine. What happens to our mind befalls our body also. The condition of the body is also the state of the mind. — Salman Rushdie

Later, when his desires had been satisfied, he slept in an odorous whorehouse, snoring lustily next to an insomniac tart, and dreamed. He could dream in seven languages: Italian, Spanic, Arabic, Persian, Russian, English and Portughese. He had picked up languages the way most sailors picked up diseases; languages were his gonorrhea, his syphilis, his scurvy, his ague,his plague. As soon as he fell asleep half the world started babbling in his brain, telling wondrous travelers' tales. In this half-discovered world every day brought news of fresh enchantments. The visionary, revelatory dream-poetry of the quotidian had not yet been crushed by blinkered, prosy fact. Himself a teller of tales, he had been driven out of his door by stories of wonder, and by one in particular, a story which could make his fortune or else cost him his life. — Salman Rushdie

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

The whole story of migration and what that has done in interconnecting the planet is obviously something I've written about a lot. — Salman Rushdie

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

In the absence of the great majority of guests, all manner of rumors came into the Shalimar Bagh, hooded and cloaked to shield themselves against the elements, and filled the empty places around the dastarkhans: cheap rumors from the gutter as well as fancy rumors claiming aristocratic parentage - an entire social hierarchy of rumor lounged against the bolsters, created by the mystery that enveloped everything like the blizzard. The rumors were veiled, shadowy, unclear, argumentative, often malicious. They seemed like a new species of living thing, and evolved according to the laws laid down by Darwin, mutating randomly and being subjected to the amoral winnowing processes of natural selection. The — Salman Rushdie

Peace broke out. — Salman Rushdie

Initially, I wanted to do films with A-list actors when I was struggling. I was hoping that I could also get that platform where I'm launched with Shah Rukh Khan, Salman Khan or Aamir Khan ... and with them my career could also start, but it didn't happen. And then came 'Queen.' — Kangana Ranaut

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

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

Noboby is succeeded by going astray from Allah — Salman Farooqi

Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts. — Salman Rushdie

My parents gave me the gift of irreligion, of growing up without bothering to ask people what gods they held dear, assuming that in fact, like my parents, they weren't interested in gods, and that this uninterest was 'normal.' You may argue that the gift was a poisoned chalice, but even if so, that's a cup from which I'd happily drink again. — Salman Rushdie

The publishing of a book is a worldwide event. The attempt to suppress a book is a worldwide event. — Salman Rushdie

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

But I - and I just think it's very - one of the problems of defending the extraordinary principle of freedom of speech is that you have to defend freedom of speech for people like that too. — Salman Rushdie

And using that - the birth of a religion, it suggests that you have got two tests. You have the test of weakness. When you're weak, do you compromise, do you bend, do you give in, do you accommodate? And then the test of strength. When you're strong, are you merciful, are you generous, or are you cruel? — Salman Rushdie

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

Don't act like a protagonist Raghu, be human," she said.
"Like Salman?" I asked and chuckled, she didn't react though. — Kavipriya Moorthy

Dissensions between Muslim nations run at least as deep, if not deeper, than those nations' resentment of the West. — Salman Rushdie

Nothing is unfilmable. — Salman Rushdie

Any film is about heroism: the triumph of good over evil. If you look back at my films, you will see that as a recurring theme. — Salman Khan

Sardar Harbans Singh passed away peacefully in a wicker rocking-chair in a Srinigar garden of spring flowers and honeybees with his favourite tartan rug across his knees and his beloved son, Yuvraj the exporter of handicrafts, by his side, and when he stopped breathing the bees stopped buzzing and the air silenced its whispers and Yuvraj understood that the story of the world he had known all his life was coming to an end, and that what followed would follow as it had to, but it would unquestionably be less graceful, less courteous and less civilized than what had gone. — Salman Rushdie

Among the great struggles of man-good/evil, reason/unreason, etc.-there is also this mighty conflict between the fantasy of Home and the fantasy of Away, the dream of roots and the mirage of the journey. — Salman Rushdie

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

( ... ) but no, ends must not be permitted to precede beginnings and middles, even if recent scientific experiments have shown us that within certain types of closed systems, under intense pressure, time can be persuaded to run backwards, so that effects precede their causes. — Salman Rushdie

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

And blessed be the first sweet suffering that I felt in being conjoined with love and the bow and the shafts with which I was pierced, and the wounds that run to the depths of my heart ... any man who loves this poem as I do, must be my master ... And any man who feels as I do about these words must be my drinking companion. — Salman Rushdie

In the home of this music, alas, religious fanatics have lately started killing the musicians. They think the music is an insult to god, who gave us voices but does not wish us to sing, who gave us free will, rai, but prefers us not to be free. — Salman Rushdie

Language upon a silvered tongue affords enchantment enough. — Salman Rushdie

I think, in a written novel, the way in which you play with the readers' emotion or the way in which you engage the readers' emotions can be very indirect. You could come at it through irony or comedy, etcetera, and you could capture people's sympathies and feelings kind of by stealth if you like. — Salman Rushdie

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

This was what was left of a human individual when you took away his home,his family, his friends, his city, his country,his world: a being without context, whose past had faded, whose future was bleak, an entity stripped of name, of meaning,of the whole of life except a temporarily beating heart. — Salman Rushdie

Volubility came easily to Max Ophuls, but it was just one of his many techniques of concealment, and he was never more hidden than when he seemed most open. For — Salman Rushdie

During, he looked away from all the strain, all the scratchiness, all the fights that never got going, he closed his eyes and waited until her smile came back. He allowed himself to believe in that smile, that brilliant counterfeit of joy — Salman Rushdie

I don't think people cry reading 'Midnight's Children,' but a lot of people seem to cry watching the movie. — Salman Rushdie

You start at the stupid end of the book, and if you're lucky you finish at the smart end. — Salman Rushdie

I remember when I was young, many cities in the Muslim world were cosmopolitan cities with a lot of culture. — Salman Rushdie

Ahmed Sinai never forgave his son for breaking his toe. Even after the splint was removed, a tiny limp remained. My father leaned over my crib and said, "So, my son: you're starting as you mean to go on. Already you've started bashing your poor old father!" In my opinion, this was only half a joke. — Salman Rushdie

If you're serious about shaking off your foreignness, Salad baba, then don't fall into some kind of rootless limbo instead. Okay? We're all here. We're right in front of you. You should really try and make an adult acquaintance with this place, this time. Try and embrace this city, as it is, not some childhood memory that makes you both nostalgic and sick. Draw it close. The actually existing place. — Salman Rushdie

But sixteen years without optimism had taken a heavy toll; — Salman Rushdie

Oh, alas, alas for his debauched children, flesh of his flesh, heir to all his failings and none of his strenghts! ... was it hard to judge a ten-year-old boy in this way? Yes, of course it was, but these were not boys. They were little gods, the despots of the future: born, unfortunately, to rule. He loved them. They would betray him. They were the lights of his life. They would come for him while he slept. The little assfuckers. He was waiting for their moves. — Salman Rushdie

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

When I was growing up, everyone around me was fond of fooling around with words. It was certainly common in my family, but I think it is typical of Bombay, and maybe of India, that there is a sense of play in the way people use language. — Salman Rushdie

You can find shame in every house, burning in an ashtray, hanging framed upon a wall, covering a bed. But nobody notices it any more. — Salman Rushdie

Many of us didn't believe in the image of bin Laden as a wandering Old Man of the Mountains, living on plants and insects in an inhospitable cave somewhere on the porous Pakistan-Afghan border. — Salman Rushdie

BOMBAY WAS CENTRAL, had been so from the moment of its creation: the bastard child of a Portuguese-English wedding, and yet the most Indian of Indian cities. In Bombay all Indias met and merged. In Bombay, too, all-India met what-was-not-India, what came across the black water to flow into our veins. Everything north of Bombay was North India, everything south of it was the South. To the east lay India's East and to the west, the world's West. Bombay was central; all rivers flowed into its human sea. It was an ocean of stories; we were all its narrators, and everybody talked at once. — Salman Rushdie

Masks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull. — Salman Rushdie

Shiva and Saleem, victor and victim; understand our rivalry, and you will gain understanding of the age in which you live. (The reverse of this statement is also true.) — Salman Rushdie

We are other than what we would have been if we had crossed the oceans, if or mothers and fathers had not crossed the skies in search of work and dignity and a better life for their children. We have been made again: but I say that we shall also be the ones to remake this society, to shape it from the bottom to the top. — Salman Rushdie

Youth was often wretched, the struggle to become themselves tore the young to shreds, but sometimes, after the struggle, better days began. — Salman Rushdie

It matters, it always matters, to name rubbish as rubbish ... to do otherwise is to legitimize it.
Outside The Whale (Granta, 1984) — Salman Rushdie

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

You want all your books to stick around after you've gone. — Salman Rushdie

I should never have dreamed of purpose, I am coming to the conclusion that privacy, the small individual lives of men, are preferable to all this inflated macrocosmic activity. — Salman Rushdie

Proving once again that there was no escape from recurrence. — Salman Rushdie

William the Conqueror, it is said, began by eating a mouthful of English sand. — Salman Rushdie

What I worry about and don't like is the way in which the ideology of multiculturalism has declined into cultural relativism. I think that's very dangerous. When the Archbishop of Canterbury, for God's sake, says that you can't have one law for everybody ... that's stupid. — Salman Rushdie

The disgrace of your barrenness, Madam, is not yours alone. Don't you know that shame is collective? The shame of any one of us sits on us all and bends our backs. See what you're doing to your husband's people, how you repay the ones who took you in when you came penniless and a fugitive from that godless country over there. — Salman Rushdie

In my stolen photographs
for the photographer must be a thief, he must steal instants of other people's time to make his own tiny eternities
it was this intimacy I sought, hte closeness of the living and the dead. — Salman Rushdie

I admit it: above all things, I fear absurdity. — Salman Rushdie

Most interesting things in our lives happens in our absence — Salman Rushdie

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

One foreign correspondent came up to be friendly. He asked this man what he should think about what Khomeini had said. How seriously should he take it? Was it just a rhetorical flourish or something genuinely dangerous? "Oh, don't worry too much," the journalist said. "Khomeini sentences the president of the United States to death every Friday afternoon. — Salman Rushdie

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

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

The thing I really like about Twitter is the speed with which information reaches me. You find out things from Twitter long before they're on the news. That, I think, is valuable. — 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

But she had loved her philosopher so strongly that she had made him believe that her body was aroused and ecstatic. Ibn Rushd had been fooled. Men were easily deceived in such matters because they wanted to believe they had the power to arouse. She wanted to make him believe he pleased her. But the truth was that she could give physical pleasure to a man but not receive it, she could only imagine what such pleasure might be like, she could watch and learn, and offer up to her lover the outward signs of it, while trying to fool herself, as well as him, that yes, she was being pleasured too, which made her an actress, a phony, and a self-deceiving fool. — 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

Straight answers were beyond the powers of Rashid Khalifa, who would never take a short cut if there was a longer, twistier road available. — Salman Rushdie

The practice of extreme violence, known by the catch-all and often inexact term terrorism, was always of particular attraction to male individuals who were either virgins or unable to find sexual partners. Mind-altering frustration, and the damage to the male ego which accompanied it, found its release in rage and assaults. When lonely, hopeless young men were provided with loving, or at least desirous, or at the very least willing sexual partners, they lost interest in suicide belts, bombs, and the virgins of heaven, and preferred to live. — Salman Rushdie

Literature's view of human nature encouraged understanding, sympathy, and identification with people not like oneself, but the world was pushing everyone in the opposite direction, toward narrowness, — Salman Rushdie

The enemy for the fanatic is pleasure, which makes it extremely important to continue to indulge in pleasure. Dance madly. That is how you get rid of terrorism. — Salman Rushdie

What kind of God is it who's upset by a cartoon in Danish?
[Interview with Bill Moyers, Bill Moyers on Faith & Reason, June 23, 2006] — Salman Rushdie

In a public dialogue with Salman in London he [Edward Said] had once described the Palestinian plight as one where his people, expelled and dispossessed by Jewish victors, were in the unique historical position of being 'the victims of the victims': there was something quasi-Christian, I thought, in the apparent humility of that statement. — Christopher Hitchens

Keep away from her, said Ameer Merchant, but once the inexorable dynamic of the mythic has been set in motion, you might as well try and keep bees from honey, crooks from money, politicians from babies, philosophers from maybes. Vina had her hooks in me, and the consequence was the story of my life. — Salman Rushdie

Within minutes, the entire village was in the water, splashing about, falling over, getting up, moving steadily forwards towards the horizon; never looking back to shore ... "come back," he beseeched his wife: "nothing is happening. come back! — Salman Rushdie

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'm gone which would not have happened if I had not come. — Salman Rushdie

Thomas Pynchon looks exactly like Thomas Pynchon should look. He is tall, he wears lumberjack shirts and blue jeans. He has Albert Einstein white hair and Bugs Bunny front teeth. — Salman Rushdie

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

However, after the assassination of Salman Taseer, the killer of Salman Taseer was welcomed by the religious fanatics. And they showered rose petals on him and declared him a hero of Islam. That is a matter of concern for every peace-loving citizen of Pakistan because terrorists and killers should not be given this type of encouragement. And this is encouragement for other people to take lives with their own hands and kill innocent people. — Shahbaz Bhatti

It was a rare thing to be granted one's heart's desire. — Salman Rushdie