Top 500 Salman Rushdie Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “I for one don’t need a supreme “sacred” arbiter in order to be a moral being.”

— Salman Rushdie

452. “Raif Badawi’s is an important voice for all of us to hear.”

— Salman Rushdie

453. “I dislike arranged marriages. There are some mistakes for which one should not be able to blame one’s poor parents.”

— Salman Rushdie

454. “I think if we wish to live in any kind of a moral universe, we must hold the perpetrators of violence responsible for the violence they perpetrate. It’s very simple. The criminal is responsible for the crime.”

— Salman Rushdie

455. “Fundamentalists of all faiths are the fundamental evil of our time.”

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

457. “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

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 “You can’t have modern states based on ideas which have been out of date for a thousand years.”

— Salman Rushdie

459. “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

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

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

462. “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

463. “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

464. “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

465. “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

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

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

472. “The interesting thing about history sometimes. is that you know these people existed, and you knew what jobs they did, but you don’t know much about them as people, so you actually have to make them up.”

— Salman Rushdie

473. “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

474. “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

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. “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

477. “And my chutneys and kasaundies are, after all, connected to my nocturnal scribblings –– by day amongst the pickle-vats, by night within these sheets, I spend my time at the great work of preserving. Memory, as well as fruit, is being saved from the corruption of the clocks.”

— Salman Rushdie

478. “You can adhere to your faith, but that faith needs to march in line with the rest of the world and needs to find a way of expressing itself in the modern world.”

— Salman Rushdie

479. “I hate admitting that my enemies have a point.”

— Salman Rushdie

480. “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

481. “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

482. “My grandmother was very fierce and gruff. She was quite small, but she was very wide.”

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

486. “I’m a novelist. Fortunately I don’t have to rule the world.”

— Salman Rushdie

487. “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

488. “Normally when I read, I don’t like music playing.”

— Salman Rushdie

489. “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

490. “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

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

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

493. “Mo Yan is the Chinese equivalent of the Soviet Russian apparatchik writer Mikhail Sholokhov: a patsy of the regime.”

— Salman Rushdie

494. “In a novel, if you’re any good, you don’t just have good people or bad people. You have complicated people. You have real people.”

— Salman Rushdie

495. “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

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

— 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. “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

499. “When you write, you write out of your best self. Everything else drops away.”

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie