Satanic Verses Quotes & Sayings

The world of books continued to send him messages. Bharati Mukherjee and Clark Blaise wrote from America to tell him that people were making I AM SALMAN RUSHDIE button badges and proudly wearing them as a sign of their solidarity. He wanted one of those badges. Maybe Joseph Anton could wear a badge in solidarity with the person he both was and was not. Gita Mehta told him by telephone, a little waspishly, that "The Satanic Verses is not your Lear. Shame is your Lear. — Salman Rushdie

If a hungry dog looks for food, he does not look in the doghouse. — Salman Rushdie

What a leveller this remote-control gizmo was ... it chopped down the heavyweight and stretched out the slight until all the set's emissions, commercials, murders, game-shows, the thousand and one varying joys and terrors of the real and the imagined, acquired an equal weight ... — Salman Rushdie

I opposed the Fatwa against Salman Rushdie. I read the book and took a critical distance. I did not think The Satanic Verses is a blasphemous book. I did not consider the book as being a great read, but as an intellectual I read, I assess, and I respond. I make a difference between true freedom of expression to which we owe a response and provocation, which we ignore. — Tariq Ramadan

When have I ever suggested you burn them? I am allowed to have opinions, aren't I? And I don't hate them - I don't give a fig about them. The only reason I cared is because you were so comfortable belittling me for believing things you only read about. I was afraid you'd turn into one of those literary types who say books can change the world when they're feeling good about themselves and it's only a book when anybody challenges them. It wasn't about the books themselves - it was about hypocrisy. You can speak casually about burning the Alf Yeom for the same reason you'd be horrified if I suggested burning The Satanic Verses - because you have reactions, not convictions. — G. Willow Wilson

When I was writing 'The Satanic Verses,' if you had asked me about the phenomenon that we all now know as radical Islam, I wouldn't have had much to say. As recently as the mid-1980s, it didn't seem to be a big deal. — Salman Rushdie

To be born again," sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, "first you have to die. — Salman Rushdie

We've seen violent responses to 'Satanic Verses.' We've seen violent responses to the cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed in an evil way. — Susan Rice

Ravings, in short, jealousy of the past, the worst kind of all. — Salman Rushdie

Satanic Verses is a despicable book that could not have been written by a person who wished to behave decently and responsibly. — Orson Scott Card

In writing 'The Satanic Verses,' I think I was writing for the first time from the whole of myself. The English part, the Indian part. The part of me that loves London, and the part that longs for Bombay. And at my typewriter, alone, I could indulge this. — Salman Rushdie

And the incident of the Satanic verses in the early career of the Prophet, and the politics of Muhammad's harem after his return to Mecca in triumph; and the surrealism of the newspapers, in which butterflies could fly into young girls' mouths, asking to be consumed, and children were born with no faces, — Salman Rushdie

If you are for Allah, I am for Al-Lat. And she doesn't believe your God when he recognizes her. Her opposition to him is implacable, irrevocable, engulfing. The war between us cannot end in truce. And what a truce! Yours is a patronizing, condescending lord. Al-Lat hasn't the slightest wish to be Allah's daughter. She is his equal, as I am yours. — Salman Rushdie

'The Satanic Verses' was denied the ordinary life of a novel. It became something smaller and uglier: an insult. — Salman Rushdie

While he was writing the novel he received an invitation from the American University in Cairo, asking him to come and talk to their students. They said they couldn't pay him much but they could, if he were interested, arrange for him to take a boat up the Nile for a few days in the company of one of their leading Egyptologists. To see the world of ancient Egypt was one of his great unfulfilled dreams and he wrote back quickly. "If I could just finish my novel and arrange to come after that, that would be best," he suggested. Then he finished the novel,and it was The Satanic Verses, and a trip to Egypt became impossible, and he had to accept that he might never see the Pyramids, or Memphis, or Luxor, or Thebes, or Abu Simbel. It was one of the many futures he would lose. — Salman Rushdie

Well, we're still in the middle of it. And it doesn't show any sign of going away. And these attacks that were - that seemed so odd at the time, with "Satanic Verses," because we didn't have any context for this. You know, where did that come from? It seemed to come out of nowhere. — Salman Rushdie

I had a fall out with Satan. Repeating satanic verses. — Layzie Bone

I've read The Satanic Verses and I thought it a nasty, sneering, free-thinking book ... I can understand why the book is offensive and it didn't seem to me to be anything but offensive when I read it. — Maurice Cowling

Prophet Mohammed would have no objection to The Satanic Verses. — Salman Rushdie