Top 500 Salman Rushdie Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “A photograph is a moral decision taken in one eighth of a second. ”

— Salman Rushdie

Featured in: Photography Quotes

2. “Reality is a question of perspective;.”

— Salman Rushdie

3. “English, no longer, an English language, now grows from many roots.”

— Salman Rushdie

4. “Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, power to retell it, to rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change, truly are powerless, because they cannot think new thoughts.”

— Salman Rushdie

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

5. “Our lives teach us who we are.”

— Salman Rushdie

6. “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 and of the heart.”

— Salman Rushdie

7. “The moment you declare a set of ideas to be immune from criticism, satire, derision, or contempt, freedom of thought becomes impossible.”

— Salman Rushdie

8. “The only people who see the whole picture,? he murmured, ’are the ones who step out of the frame.”

— Salman Rushdie

9. “What can’t be cured must be endured.”

— Salman Rushdie

10. “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

11. “I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I’m gone which would not have happened if I had not come.”

— Salman Rushdie

12. “Liberate yourself, because no one else is going to liberate you.”

— Salman Rushdie

13. “What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.”

— Salman Rushdie

14. “If you’re offended, it’s your problem.”

— Salman Rushdie

15. “From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable.”

— Salman Rushdie

16. “I don’t dictate to anyone what to believe and what not to. And I don’t want that to be dictated to me either.”

— Salman Rushdie

17. “After a long, hopeless war, people will settle for peace, at almost any price.”

— Salman Rushdie

18. “Broad-mindedness is related to tolerance; open-mindedness is the sibling of peace.”

— Salman Rushdie

19. “We are the storytelling animal.”

— Salman Rushdie

20. “Home is the place where you feel happy.”

— Salman Rushdie

21. “We all owe death a life.”

— Salman Rushdie

22. “Hyperrealism can create an atmosphere of surrealism because nobody sees the world in such detail.”

— Salman Rushdie

23. “There is no such thing as perfect security, only varying levels of insecurity.”

— Salman Rushdie

24. “When you throw everything up in the air anything becomes possible.”

— Salman Rushdie

25. “Good advice is rarer than rubies.”

— Salman Rushdie

26. “Vertigo is the conflict between the fear of falling and the desire to fall.”

— Salman Rushdie

27. “In the cookie of life, friends are the chocolate chips.”

— Salman Rushdie

28. “Now I know what a ghost is. Unfinished business, that’s what.”

— Salman Rushdie

29. “Bread and books: food for the body and food for the soul – what could be more worthy of our respect, and even love?”

— Salman Rushdie

Featured in: Book Quotes

30. “I grew up kissing books and bread.”

— Salman Rushdie

Featured in: Book Quotes, Reading Quotes

31. “Most of what matters in your life takes place in your absence.”

— Salman Rushdie

32. “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

33. “How do you defeat terrorism? Don’t be terrorized.”

— Salman Rushdie

34. “The miniatures of the Mughal period are really the pinnacle of Indian artistic achievement. And not a single one of those paintings is done by an individual artist.”

— Salman Rushdie

Featured in: Achievement Quotes, Artist Quotes

35. “A mature society understands that at the heart of democracy is argument.”

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

37. “When thought becomes excessively painful, action is the finest remedy.”

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

39. “Our lives disconnect and reconnect, we move on, and later we may again touch one another, again bounce away. This is the felt shape of a human life, neither simply linear nor wholly disjunctive nor endlessly bifurcating, but rather this bouncey-castle sequence of bumpings-into and tumblings-apart.”

— Salman Rushdie

40. “Perhaps the story you finish is never the one you begin.”

— Salman Rushdie

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

41. “Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true.”

— Salman Rushdie

42. “She saw him fracture into rainbow colors through the prism of her love.”

— Salman Rushdie

43. “Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.”

— Salman Rushdie

44. “Rohinton Mistry’s celebrated novel ‘Such a Long Journey’ was pulled off the syllabus of Mumbai University because local extremists objected to its content.”

— Salman Rushdie

45. “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

46. “We cannot allow religious hooligans to place limiting points on thought.”

— Salman Rushdie

47. “Thomas Pynchon looks exactly like Thomas Pynchon should look. He is tall, he wears lumberjack shirts and blue jeans. He has Albert Einstein white hair and Bugs Bunny front teeth.”

— Salman Rushdie

48. “Prophet Mohammed would have no objection to The Satanic Verses.”

— Salman Rushdie

49. “If you want to tell the untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you’ve got to find a language. Which goes for film as well as prose, for documentary as well as autobiography. Use the wrong language, and you’re dumb and blind.”

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie