Salman Rushdie - People Quotes

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

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

Salman Rushdie
When I was growing up, everyone around me was fond of fooling around with words. It was certainly common in my family, but I think it is typical of Bombay, and maybe of India, that there is a sense of play in the way people use language. Most people in India are multilingual, and if you listen to the urban speech patterns there you'll find it's quite characteristic that a sentence will begin in one language, go through a second language and end in a third. It's the very playful, very natural result of juggling languages. You are always reaching for the most appropriate phrase.

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

Salman Rushdie
Too many people spouting too many words, and in the end those words will turn to bullets and stones.

Salman Rushdie
Too many people had spent too long demonizing or totemizing me to listen seriously to what I had to say. In the West, some "friends" turned against me, calling me by yet another set of insulting names. Now I was spineless, pathetic, debased; I had betrayed myself, my Cause; above all, I had betrayed them.
I also found myself up against the granite, heartless certainties of Actually Existing Islam, by which I mean the political and priestly power structure that presently dominates and stifles Muslim societies. Actually Existing Islam has failed to create a free society anywhere on Earth, and it wasn't about to let me, of all people, argue in favor of one.

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
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
Sometimes, people trying to commit suicide manage it in a manner that leaves them breathless with astonishment.

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

Salman Rushdie
Something was badly amiss with the spiritual life of the planet...Too many demons inside people claiming to believe in God.

Salman Rushdie
I do not envy people who think they have a complete explanation of the world, for the simple reason that they are obviously wrong.

Salman Rushdie
I've been worrying about God a little bit lately. It seems as if he's been lashing out, you know, destroying cities, annihilating places. It seems like he's been in a bad mood. And I think it has to do with the quality of lovers he's been getting. If you look at the people who love God now, you know, if I was God, I'd need to destroy something.

Salman Rushdie
There is no right in the world not to be offended. That right simply doesn't exist. In a free society, an open society, people have strong opinions, and these opinions very often clash. In a democracy, we have to learn to deal with this. And this is true about novels, it's true about cartoons, it's true about all these products.

Salman Rushdie
A people that has remained convinced of its greatness and invulnerability, that has chosen to believe such a myth in the face of all the evidence, is a people in the grip of a kind of sleep, or madness.

Salman Rushdie
My parents gave me the gift of irreligion, of growing up without bothering to ask people what gods they held dear, assuming that in fact, like my parents, they weren't interested in gods, and that this uninterest was 'normal.' You may argue that the gift was a poisoned chalice, but even if so, that's a cup from which I'd happily drink again.

Salman Rushdie