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Salman Rushdie Quotes
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Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie is a British Indian novelist and essayist. His second novel, Midnight's Children , won the Booker Prize in 1981 and was deemed to be "the best novel of all winners" on two separate occasions, marking the 25th and the 40th anniversary of the prize. Much of his fiction is set on the Indian subcontinent. He combines magical realism with historical fiction; his work is concerned with the many connections, disruptions, and migrations between Eastern and Western civilizations.

His fourth novel, The Satanic Verses , was the subject of a major controversy, provoking protests from Muslims in several countries. Death threats were made against him, including a fatwā calling for his assassination issued by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of Iran, on 14 February 1989. The British government put Rushdie under police protection.

In 1983, Rushdie was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the UK's senior literary organisation. He was appointed Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of France in January 1999. In June 2007, Queen Elizabeth II knighted him for his services to literature. In 2008, The Times ranked him thirteenth on its list of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945.Since 2000, Rushdie has lived in the United States. He was named Distinguished Writer in Residence at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute of New York University in 2015. Earlier, he taught at Emory University. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2012, he published Joseph Anton: A Memoir, an account of his life in the wake of the controversy over The Satanic Verses. Wikipedia  

✵ 19. June 1947
Salman Rushdie photo
Salman Rushdie: 122   quotes 14   likes

Salman Rushdie Quotes

“Having been borne across the world, we are translated men. It is normally supposed that something always gets lost in translation; I cling, obstinately, to the notion that something can also be gained.”

Salman Rushdie
Men , World

“India, the new myth--a collective fiction in which anything was possible, a fable rivalled only by the two other mighty fantasies: money and God.”

Salman Rushdie book Midnight's Children

Source: Midnight's Children

Money , God

“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 Haroun and the Sea of Stories

Source: Haroun and the Sea of Stories

Happiness

“Ignorantly is how we all fall in love; for it is a kind of fall. Closing our eyes, we leap from that cliff in hope of a soft landing. Nor is it always soft; but still, without that leap nobody comes to life.”

Salman Rushdie book The Moor's Last Sigh

Source: The Moor's Last Sigh

Love , Life , Hope

“optimism is a disease”

Salman Rushdie book Midnight's Children

Source: Midnight's Children

Disease , Optimism

“… because silence, too, has an echo, hollower and longer-lasting than the reverberations of any sound.”

Salman Rushdie book Midnight's Children

Source: Midnight's Children

Silence

“Only the foolish, blinded by language's conventions, think of fire as red or gold. Fire is blue at it's melancholy rim, green in it's envious heart. It may burn white, or even, in it's greatest rages, black.”

Salman Rushdie
Thinking , Rage , Heart

“Exile is a dream of a glorious return. Exile is a vision of revolution: Elba, not St Helena. It is an endless paradox: looking forward by always looking back. The exile is a ball hurled high into the air.”

Salman Rushdie book The Satanic Verses

Source: The Satanic Verses

Dreams

“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 The Ground Beneath Her Feet

Source: The Ground Beneath Her Feet

Life , People , Despair

“Nobody can judge an internal injury by the size of the superficial wound.”

Salman Rushdie book The Satanic Verses

Variant: You can't judge an internal injury by the size of the hole.
Source: The Satanic Verses

“Between shame and shamelessness lies the axis upon which we turn; meteorological conditions at both these poles are of the most extreme, ferocious type. Shamelessness, shame: the roots of violence.”

Salman Rushdie Shame

Source: Shame

“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 book The Satanic Verses

Source: The Satanic Verses

Love

“The inevitable triumph of illusion over reality that was the single most obvious truth about the history of the human race.”

Salman Rushdie book Shalimar the Clown

Source: Shalimar the Clown

Truth , History , Reality

“A man who catches History's eye is thereafter bound to a mistress from whom he will never escape.”

Salman Rushdie Shame

Source: Shame

History

“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 book The Satanic Verses

Source: The Satanic Verses

People , Sleep , Madness

“I know that when people pull apart, they usually employ misunderstanding as a weapon, deliberately getting hold of the stick's wrong end, impaling themselves on its point in order to prove the perfidy of the other.”

Salman Rushdie Fury

Source: Fury

People

“A little bit of one story joins onto an idea from another, and hey presto,… not old tales but new ones. Nothing comes from nothing.”

Salman Rushdie Haroun and the Sea of Stories

Source: Haroun and the Sea of Stories

Idea

“Sometimes we feel we straddle two cultures; at other times, that we fall between two stools.”

Salman Rushdie

Source: Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991

Feeling , Time

“everything is relative, one man’s absolute belief is another man’s fairy tale;”

Salman Rushdie book Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

Source: Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

“Travel was pointless. It removed you from the place in which you had a meaning, and to which you gave meaning in return by dedicating your life to it, and it spirited you away into fairylands where you were, and looked, frankly absurd.”

Salman Rushdie book The Enchantress of Florence

Source: The Enchantress of Florence

Life , Travel

“I fell victim to the temptation of every autobiographer, to the illusion that since the past exists only in one's memories and the words which strive vainly to encapsulate them, it is possible to create past events simply by saying they occurred.”

Salman Rushdie book Midnight's Children

Source: Midnight's Children

Memory , Past

“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 book The Enchantress of Florence

Source: The Enchantress of Florence

Lie , Error

“This may be the curse of human race. Not that we are different from one anther, but we are so alike.”

Salman Rushdie book The Enchantress of Florence

Source: The Enchantress of Florence

“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

“Confusion to our enemies!”

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)