Salman Rushdie Quotes

154 Sourced Quotes

Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory.

Salman Rushdie
If a birth is the fall-out from the explosion caused by the union of two unstable elements, then perhaps a half-life is all we can expect.

Salman Rushdie
'Religion, a mediaeval 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. 'I stand with Charlie Hebdo, as we all must, to defend the art of satire, which has always been a force for liberty and against tyranny, dishonesty and stupidity. 'Respect for religion' has become a code phrase meaning 'fear of religion.' Religions, like all other ideas, deserve criticism, satire, and, yes, our fearless disrespect.

Salman Rushdie
Rock and roll music - the music of freedom frightens people and unleashes all manner of conservative defense mechanisms.

Salman Rushdie
Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems – but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible.

Salman Rushdie
Can one drown in one's element... If fish can drown in water, can human beings suffocate in air?

Salman Rushdie
And so it is they who, between them, give me all the reasons for believing in none.

Salman Rushdie
When you know what you're against you have taken the first step to discovering what you're for.

Salman Rushdie
They lived in a great city, a metropolis of many narratives that converged briefly and then separated for ever, discovering their different dooms in that crowd of stories through which all of us, following our own destinies, had to push and shove to find our way through, or out.

Salman Rushdie
If love is a yearning to be like (even to become) the beloved, then hatred, it must be said, can be engendered by the same ambition, when it cannot be fulfilled.

Salman Rushdie
He knew what he knew: that the real world was full of magic, so magical worlds could easily be real.

Salman Rushdie
I reluctantly concluded that there was no way for me to help bring into being the Muslim culture I'd dreamed of, the progressive, irreverent, skeptical, argumentative, playful and unafraid culture which is what I've always understood as freedom. Not me, not in this lifetime, no chance. Actually Existing Islam, which has all but deified its Prophet, a man who always fought passionately against such deification, which has supplanted a priest-free religion by a priest-ridden one, which makes literalism a weapon and redescription a crime, will never let the likes of me in.

Salman Rushdie
When you throw everything up in the air anything becomes possible.

Salman Rushdie
People don't like being around despair. Our tolerance for the truly hopeless, for those who are irredeemably broken by life is strictly limited. The sob stories we like are the ones that end before we're bored.

Salman Rushdie
One minute you've got a lucky star watching over you and the next instant it's done a bunk.

Salman Rushdie
The fact of being alive compensated for what life did to 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
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
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
Few topographical boundaries can rival the frontiers of the mind.

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
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
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