Salman Rushdie Quotes

154 Sourced Quotes

The acceptance that all that is solid has melted into the air, that reality and morality are not givens but imperfect human constructs, is the point from which fiction begins.

Salman Rushdie
Such is the miraculous nature of the future of exiles: what is first uttered in the impotence of an overheated apartment becomes the fate of nations.

Salman Rushdie
What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.

Salman Rushdie
The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas — uncertainty, progress, change — into crimes.

Salman Rushdie
A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return.

Salman Rushdie
Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.

Salman Rushdie
If Woody Allen were a Muslim, he'd be dead by now.

Salman Rushdie
Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.

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
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
How to forgive the world for its beauty, which merely disguises its ugliness; for its gentleness, which merely cloaks its cruelty; for its illusion of continuity, seamlessly, as the night follows the day, so to speak- whereas in reality life is a series of brutal raptures, falling upon your defenseless hands, like the blows of a woodman's axe?

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

Salman Rushdie
Now I know what a ghost is. Unfinished business, that's what.

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
Every pickle-jar…contains, therefore, the most exalted of possibilities: the feasibility of the chutnification of history.

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

Salman Rushdie
Throughout human history, the apostles of purity, those who have claimed to possess a total explanation, have wrought havoc among mere mixed-up human beings.

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

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
No story comes from nowhere; new stories are born from old.

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
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