Salman Rushdie: Trending quotes (page 6)

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

Salman Rushdie The Ground Beneath Her Feet

Source: The Ground Beneath Her Feet

Salman Rushdie book The Moor's Last Sigh

The Moor's Last Sigh

“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

Salman Rushdie — Talking with David Frost (1993)

People , World , Thinking , Envy

“It is a funny view of the world that a book can cause riots.”

Salman Rushdie

(When asked if he apprehended riots) Interview with Shrabani Basu (September 1988), quoted in Elst, Koenraad (2001). Decolonizing the Hindu mind: Ideological development of Hindu revivalism. New Delhi: Rupa. p. 32

Books , World

“Two things form the bedrock of any open society—freedom of expression and rule of law. If you don’t have those things, you don’t have a free country.”

Salman Rushdie

The Times of India, ‘Don’t allow religious hooligans to dictate terms’ http://archive.is/ecOpa (16 January 2008)

Law , Freedom , Country

“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

Herbert Reade Memorial Lecture (6 February 1990)

Idea , Change

“A question I have often asked is, ‘What would an inoffensive political cartoon look like?’ What would a respectful cartoon look like? The form requires disrespect and so if we are going to have in the world things like cartoons and satire, we just have to accept it as part of the price of freedom.”

Salman Rushdie

The Hindu interview (2012)

World , Question , Freedom , Parting

“It matters, it always matters, to name rubbish as rubbish … to do otherwise is to legitimize it.”

Salman Rushdie

"Outside The Whale" in Granta (1984) http://web.archive.org/web/20110618004653/http://www.granta.com/Magazine/11/Outside-the-Whale/Page-2

“The responsibility for violence lies with those who perpetrate it.”

Salman Rushdie

"In Good Faith" (1990), p. 19

“I don't think there is a need for an entity like God in my life.”

Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie — Talking with David Frost (1993)

Life , God , Thinking

“The fundamentalist seeks to bring down a great deal more than buildings. Such people are against, to offer just a brief list, freedom of speech, a multi-party political system, universal adult suffrage, accountable government, Jews, homosexuals, women's rights, pluralism, secularism, short skits, dancing, beardlessness, evolution theory, sex. There are tyrants, not Muslims. United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan has said that we should now define ourselves not only by what we are for but by what we are against. I would reverse that proposition, because in the present instance what we are against is a no brainer. Suicidist assassins ram wide-bodied aircraft into the World Trade Center and Pentagon and kill thousands of people: um, I'm against that. But what are we for? What will we risk our lives to defend? Can we unanimously concur that all the items in the preceding list — yes, even the short skirts and the dancing — are worth dying for? The fundamentalist believes that we believe in nothing. In his world-view, he has his absolute certainties, while we are sunk in sybaritic indulgences. To prove him wrong, we must first know that he is wrong. We must agree on what matters: kissing in public places, bacon sandwiches, disagreement, cutting-edge fashion, literature, generosity, water, a more equitable distribution of the world's resources, movies, music, freedom of thought, beauty, love. These will be our weapons. Not by making war but by the unafraid way we choose to live shall we defeat them. How to defeat terrorism? Don't be terrorized. Don't let fear rule your life. Even if you are scared.”

Salman Rushdie

Step Across This Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992–2002

Love , Life , Women , War

“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 book The Satanic Verses

The Satanic Verses (1988)

“What kind of God is it who's upset by a cartoon in Danish?”

Salman Rushdie

Interview with Bill Moyers, Bill Moyers on Faith & Reason (23 June 2006) http://www.pbs.org/moyers/faithandreason/portraits_rushdie.html - transcript http://www.pbs.org/moyers/faithandreason/print/faithandreason101_print.html

God

“Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination of the heart.”

Salman Rushdie

The Hindu (26 February 1995)

Truth , Hope , Imagination , Literature

“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

Statement in the Wall Street Journal, Salman Rushdie: ‘I Stand With Charlie Hebdo, as We All Must’ http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2015/01/07/salman-rushdie-i-stand-with-charlie-hebdo-as-we-all-must/ (7 January 2015)

Stupidity , Fear , Religion , Art

“God, Satan, Paradise, and Hell all vanished one day in my fifteenth year, when I quite abruptly lost my faith. … and afterwards, to prove my new-found atheism, I bought myself a rather tasteless ham sandwich, and so partook for the first time of the forbidden flesh of the swine. No thunderbolt arrived to strike me down. … From that day to this I have thought of myself as a wholly secular person.”

Salman Rushdie

"In God We Trust" (1985)

God , Faith , Hell , Swine

“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

The Hindu interview (2012)

People , World , Democracy , Strong

“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

Real Time with Bill Maher TV show (7 October 2005)

Love , God , People , Lovers

“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

Address at Columbia University (1991)

Religion , Dreams , Way , Freedom

“Our lives teach us who we are.”

Salman Rushdie

I have learned the hard way that when you permit anyone else's description of reality to supplant your own — and such descriptions have been raining down on me, from security advisers, governments, journalists, Archbishops, friends, enemies, mullahs — then you might as well be dead. 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. Yet I must cling with all my might to … my own soul; must hold on to its mischievous, iconoclastic, out-of-step clown-instincts, no matter how great the storm. And if that plunges me into contradiction and paradox, so be it; I've lived in that messy ocean all my life. I've fished in it for my art. This turbulent sea was the sea outside my bedroom window in Bombay. It is the sea by which I was born, and which I carry within me wherever I go.
"Free speech is a non-starter," says one of my Islamic extremist opponents. No, sir, it is not. Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.
Address at Columbia University (1991)