Salman Rushdie Quotes

154 Sourced Quotes

The act of migration puts into crisis everything about the migrating individual or group, everything about identity and self-hood and culture and belief. So if this is a novel about migration it must be that act of putting in question. It must perform the crisis it describes.

Salman Rushdie
I hate admitting that my enemies have a point.

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
Not all possibilities are open to us. The world is finite; our hopes spill over its rim.

Salman Rushdie
English, no longer an English language, now grows from many roots; and those whom it once colonized are carving out large territories within the language for themselves. The Empire is striking back.

Salman Rushdie
Names, once they are in common use, quickly become mere sounds, their etymology being buried, like so many of the earth's marvels, beneath the dust of habit.

Salman Rushdie
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
Don't you know girls have to fool people every day of their lives if they want to get anywhere?

Salman Rushdie
There is no magic on earth strong enough to wipe out the legacies of one's parents.

Salman Rushdie
The history of life was not the bumbling progress — the very English, middle-class progress — Victorian thought had wanted it to be, but violent, a thing of dramatic, cumulative transformations: in the old formulation, more revolution than evolution.

Salman Rushdie
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
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
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
There needs to be a thorough examination, by Muslims everywhere, of why it is that the faith they love breeds so many violent mutant strains.

Salman Rushdie
What one writer can make in the solitude of one room is something no power can easily destroy.

Salman Rushdie
It's fun to read things when you don't know all the words. Even children love it. One of the things any great children's writer will tell you is that children like it if in books designed for their age group there is a vocabulary just slightly bigger than theirs. So they come up against weird words, and the weird words excite them. If you describe a small girl in a story as loquacious, it works so much better than talkative. And then some little girl will read the book and her sister will be shooting her mouth off and she will say to her sister, Don't be so loquacious. It is a whole new weapon in her arsenal.

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
How does newness come into the world? How is it born? Of what fusions, translations, conjoinings is it made? How does it survive, extreme and dangerous as it is? What compromises, what deals, what betrayals of its secret nature must it make to stave off the wrecking crew, the exterminating angel, the guillotine? Is birth always a fall? Do angels have wings? Can men fly?

Salman Rushdie
Our lives are not what we deserve; they are, let us agree, in many ways deficient.

Salman Rushdie
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
A man is sane only to the extent that he subscribes to a previously-agreed construction of reality.

Salman Rushdie
Obviously, a rigid, blinkered, absolutist world view is the easiest to keep hold of, whereas the fluid, uncertain, metamorphic picture I've always carried about is rather more vulnerable.

Salman Rushdie
If somebody's trying to shut you up, sing louder, and if possible, better.

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
He would dream of discovering a magic optometrist from whom he would purchase a pair of green-tinged spectacles which would correct his regrettable myopia, and after that he would be able to see through the dense, blinding air to the fabulous world beneath.

Salman Rushdie
I determined to make my peace with Islam, even at the cost of my pride. Those who were surprised and displeased by what I did perhaps failed to see that... I wanted to make peace between the warring halves of the world, which were also the warring halves of my soul.

Salman Rushdie
Human beings do not perceive things whole; we are not gods but wounded creatures, cracked lenses, capably only of fractured perceptions. Partial beings, in all the senses of that phrase.

Salman Rushdie
Few topographical boundaries can rival the frontiers of the mind.

Salman Rushdie
The fact of being alive compensated for what life did to one.

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