Top 500 Salman Rushdie Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 10 of 10

451. “There is a point beyond which conciliation looks like capitulation. I do not believe I passed that point, but others have thought otherwise.”

— Salman Rushdie

452. “What I’ve always tried to find in my books are points at which the private lives of the characters, and also my own, intersect with the public life of the culture.”

— Salman Rushdie

453. “Certainly, the Hollywood cinema, there’s almost nothing of interest coming out of there.”

— Salman Rushdie

454. “Sometimes writing a novel is not unlike having a baby. You’d have to ask a female novelist to compare the pain.”

— Salman Rushdie

455. “Everest silences you... when you come down, nothing seems worth saying, nothing at all. You find the nothingness wrapping you up, like a sound. Non-being. You can’t keep it up, of course. the world rushes in soon enough. What shuts you up is, I think, the sight you’ve had of perfection: why speak if you can’t manage perfect thoughts, perfect sentences? It feels like a betrayal of what you’ve been through. But it fades; you accept that certain compromises, closures, are required if you’re to continue.”

— Salman Rushdie

456. “Every quest takes places in both the sphere of the actual, which is what maps reveal to us, and in the sphere of the symbolic, for which the only maps are the unseen ones in our heads.”

— Salman Rushdie

457. “I always thought the front line was the bookstores. And bookstores around America, around the world did astonishingly well. They held the line. They didn’t chicken out. You know, they defended the book. They kept it in the front of the store.”

— Salman Rushdie

Featured in: Book Quotes

458. “Everybody loves ‘The Wire,’ and I think it’s okay, but in the end it’s just a police series.”

— Salman Rushdie

459. “The West sees Iran as an important force in the gulf.”

— Salman Rushdie

460. “The novel does not seek to establish a privileged language but it insists upon the freedom to portray and analyze the struggle between the different contestants for such privileges.”

— Salman Rushdie

461. “You don’t fight radical conservatism with not-quite-so radical conservatism.”

— Salman Rushdie

462. “When you are making an independent film, money is never an issue.”

— Salman Rushdie

463. “I for one don’t need a supreme “sacred” arbiter in order to be a moral being.”

— Salman Rushdie

464. “You can lay your strategies as carefully as you like, but women will undo them at a stroke.”

— Salman Rushdie

465. “I, too, have ropes around my neck. I have them to this day, pulling me this way and that, East and West, the nooses tightening, commanding, choose, choose. I buck, I snort, I whinny, I rear, Ikick. Ropes, I do not choose between you. Lassoes, lariats, I choose neither of you, and both. Doyou hear? I refuse to choose.”

— Salman Rushdie

466. “But I – and I just think it’s very – one of the problems of defending the extraordinary principle of freedom of speech is that you have to defend freedom of speech for people like that too.”

— Salman Rushdie

467. “At the beginning of their work together Arthur Hibbert gave him a piece of advice he never forgot. “You must never write history,” Hibbert said, “until you can hear the people speak.” He thought about that for years, and in the end it came to feel like a valuable guiding principle for fiction as well. If you didn’t have a sense of how people spoke, you didn’t know them well enough, and so you couldn’t – you shouldn’t – tell their story.”

— Salman Rushdie

468. “I do think there was a period there when my sanity was under intense pressure, and I didn’t know what to say or do or how to act. I was literally living from day to day.”

— Salman Rushdie

469. “I’m no friend of Tony Blair’s and I consider the Middle East policies of the United States and the UK fatal.”

— Salman Rushdie

470. “My children are English, and both of their mothers were English.”

— Salman Rushdie

471. “Men on the road together have three choices. They separate, they kill one another, or they work things out.”

— Salman Rushdie

472. “I’m not a big fan of there being voiceovers in movies. I really prefer it when the film tells it story.”

— Salman Rushdie

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

473. “Writers have been in terrible situations and have yet managed to produce extraordinary work.”

— Salman Rushdie

474. “You can’t have modern states based on ideas which have been out of date for a thousand years.”

— Salman Rushdie

475. “Unashamed, accustomed to solitude, he began to enjoy his near-invisibility. From his position at the edge of the school around him, he took vicarious pleasure in the activities of those around him, silently celebrating the rise or fall of this or that playground emperor, or the examination failures of particularly unappetizing class-fellows: the delights of the spectator.”

— Salman Rushdie

476. “Systems of thought, and their antitheses as well, are merely codifications of what we think we know. When we begin to abandon them, we open ourselves to the immensity of the universe, and therefore also to immense possibilities, including the possibility of the impossible.”

— Salman Rushdie

477. “Killing people because you don’t like their ideas – it’s a bad thing.”

— Salman Rushdie

478. “The art of the cinema,’ Truffaut allegedly said, ’is to point the camera at a beautiful woman.”

— Salman Rushdie

479. “If I were dead, then nobody in England would have to fuss about the cost of my security and whether or not I merited such special treatment for so long.”

— Salman Rushdie

480. “We live in a frightened time, and people self-censor all the time and are afraid of going into some subjects because they are worried about violent reactions.”

— Salman Rushdie

481. “Study history, Alleluia. In this century history stopped paying attention to the old psychological orientation of reality. I mean, these days, character isn’t destiny any more. Economics is destiny. Ideology is destiny. Bombs are destiny. What does a famine, a gas chamber, a grenade care how you lived your life? Crisis comes, death comes, and your pathetic individual self doesn’t have a thing to do with it, only to suffer the effects. This Gibreel of yours: maybe he’s how history happens to you.”

— Salman Rushdie

482. “How young he was when he made the surprisingly adult resolution to escape from the unpalatable reality of dreams into the slightly more acceptable illusions of his everyday, walking life!”

— Salman Rushdie

483. “The only way to find out why someone decides to engage in armed combat is to look at their individual personality.”

— Salman Rushdie

484. “In the end, everyone can do without fathers.”

— Salman Rushdie

485. “In the movies, the writer is just the servant, the employee.”

— Salman Rushdie

486. “Across the Atlantic, in another theatre of the identity wars, the British prime minister was narrowing the definition of Britishness to exclude multiplicity, internationalism, the world as the location of the self. Only little England would do to define the English.”

— Salman Rushdie

487. “One foreign correspondent came up to be friendly. He asked this man what he should think about what Khomeini had said. How seriously should he take it? Was it just a rhetorical flourish or something genuinely dangerous? “Oh, don’t worry too much,” the journalist said. “Khomeini sentences the president of the United States to death every Friday afternoon.”

— Salman Rushdie

488. “She allowed history to leave her without trying to hold it back, the way children allow a grand parade to pass, holding it in their memory, making it an unforgettable thing, making it their own.”

— Salman Rushdie

489. “If you actually want to change your world, there is a better way of doing it than blowing yourself up.”

— Salman Rushdie

490. “Sometimes when you finish a book, you don’t know quite what you’ve got.”

— Salman Rushdie

Featured in: Book Quotes

491. “The people with whom you share a history: these are the people who can leave you shipwrecked and drowning.”

— Salman Rushdie

492. “It is the age of numbers, isn’t it? So we are numbers and the Elbees are words. We are mathemathics and they are poetry. We are winning and they are losing; and so of course they’re afraid of us, it’s like a struggle inside human nature itself, between what’s mechanical and utilitarian in us and the part that loves and dreams. We all fear that the cold machine-like thing in human nature will destroy our magic and song.”

— Salman Rushdie

493. “It’s always been colossally important to me that my books should be well received in India. It’s where I come from.”

— Salman Rushdie

Featured in: Book Quotes

494. “I do not need the idea of God to explain the world I live in.”

— Salman Rushdie

495. “I’ve never yet managed to write a novel which didn’t have an Indian central character.”

— Salman Rushdie

496. “Most of the oppression of Muslims in the world right now is carried out by other Muslims.”

— Salman Rushdie

497. “When they saw the host of chameleon butterflies and the way they both clothed the girl Ayesha and provided her with her only solid food, these visitors were amazed, and retreated with confounded expectations, that is to say with a hole in their pictures of the world that they could not paper over.”

— Salman Rushdie

498. “The old man has always believed in the mutability of things; has known that no matter how solid the ground beneath your feet may seem, it can, at any moment, turn into quicksand and suck you down. Always be prepared.”

— Salman Rushdie

499. “When you start writing about the stuff that is the central experience of your own life, you can talk about whatever you want, in whatever way you want.”

— Salman Rushdie

500. “Hey you, long face,′ shouted an elderly gent who must have been at least seventy years old, but who was dancing through the flooded, rainy streets, waving a rolled umbrella like a sword. ‘Don’t you sing those Tragedy Songs round here.”

— Salman Rushdie