Salman Rushdie Quotes

154 Sourced Quotes

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
Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can't forgive.

Salman Rushdie
Believe in your own eyes and you'll get into a lot of trouble, hot water, a mess.

Salman Rushdie
An iceberg is water striving to be land; a mountain, especially a Himalaya, especially Everest, is land's attempt to metamorphose into sky; it is grounded in flight, the earth mutated—nearly—into air, and become, in the true sense, exalted. Long before she ever encountered the mountain, Allie was aware of its brooding presence in her soul.

Salman Rushdie
For many people, I've ceased to be a human being. I've become an issue, a bother, an "affair." … And has it really been so long since religions persecuted people, burning them as heretics, drowning them as witches, that you can't recognize religious persecution when you see it? … What is my single life worth? Despair whispers in my ear: "Not a lot." But I refuse to give in to despair … because … I know that many people do care, and are appalled by the … upside-down logic of the post-fatwa world, in which a … novelist can be accused of having savaged or "mugged" a whole community, becoming its tormentor (instead of its … victim) and the scapegoat for … its discontents…. (What minority is smaller and weaker than a minority of one?)

Salman Rushdie
Nothing really improves us. Whatever improves one person will disimprove another. Some people are paralyzed by the consciousness of death, other people live with it. … The fatwa certainly made me think about it a lot more than I ever had. I guess I know I'm going to die, but then, so are you. And one of the things that I thought a lot about at the time of the fatwa and ever since is that quite a few of the people I really care about died during this period, all about the same age as I am, and they were not under a death sentence. They just died, of lung cancer, AIDS, whatever. It occurred to me that you don't need a fatwa, it can happen anytime.

Salman Rushdie
I used to say: 'there is a God-shaped hole in me.' For a long time I stressed the absence, the hole. Now I find it is the shape which has become more important.

Salman Rushdie
Go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets. Take a deep breath before you begin talking. Aim for the stars. Keep grinning. Be bloody-minded. Argue with the world. And never forget that writing is as close as we get to keeping a hold on the thousand and one things—childhood, certainties, cities, doubts, dreams, instants, phrases, parents, loves—that go on slipping, like sand, through our fingers.

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
I learned: the first lesson of my life: nobody can face the world with his eyes open all the time.

Salman Rushdie
Abraham Zogoiby covered his face that night in August 1939 because he had been assailed by fear, [...] a sudden apprehension that the ugliness of life might defeat its beauty; that love did not make lovers invulnerable. Nevertheless, he thought, even if the world's beauty and love were on the edge of destruction, theirs would still be the only side to be on; defeated love would still be love, hate's victory would not make it other than it was.

Salman Rushdie
Wherever goodness lay, it did not lie in ritual, unthinking obeisance before a deity but rather, perhaps, in the slow clumsy, error-strewn working out of an individual or collective path.

Salman Rushdie
Your blasphemy, Salman, can't be forgiven... To set your words against the Words of God.

Salman Rushdie
The point is always reached after which the gods no longer share their lives with mortal men and women, they die or wither away or retire... Now that they've gone, the high drama's over. What remains is ordinary human life.

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

Salman Rushdie
Where there is no belief, there is no blasphemy.

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
The only people who see the whole picture are the ones who step outside the frame.

Salman Rushdie
Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true.

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
One of the things a writer is for is to say the unsayable, speak the unspeakable and ask difficult questions.

Salman Rushdie
Family history, of course, has its proper dietary laws. One is supposed to swallow and digest only the permitted parts of it, the halal portions of the past, drained of their redness, their blood.

Salman Rushdie
Captain Ahab drowned, he reminded himself; it was the trimmer, Ishmael, who survived.

Salman Rushdie
No people whose word for "yesterday" is the same as their word for "tomorrow" can be said to have a firm grip on the time.

Salman Rushdie
Question: What is the opposite of faith? Not disbelief. Too final, certain, closed. Itself a kind of belief. Doubt.

Salman Rushdie
A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.

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

Salman Rushdie
Make as much racket as you like people. Noise is life and an excess of noise is a sign that life is good. There will be time for us all to be quiet when we are safely dead.

Salman Rushdie
The real wars of religion are the wars religions unleash against ordinary citizens within their 'sphere of influence'.

Salman Rushdie
Most of what matters in our lives takes place in our absence.

Salman Rushdie