Top 500 Salman Rushdie Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “This is what I am not: I am not one thing. I contain multitudes.”

— Salman Rushdie

452. “We, the public, are easily, lethally offended. We have come to think of taking offence as a fundamental right. We value very little more highly than our rage, which gives us, in our opinion, the moral high ground. From this high ground we can shoot down at our enemies and inflict heavy fatalities. We take pride in our short fuses. Our anger elevates, transcends.”

— Salman Rushdie

453. “A little thinking is a dangerous thing.”

— Salman Rushdie

454. “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

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

— Salman Rushdie

456. “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

457. “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

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

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

462. “How treacherous history is! Half-truths, ignorance, deceptions, false trails, errors and lies, and buried somewhere in between all of that, the truth, in which it is easy to lose faith, of which it is consequently easy to say, it’s a chimera, there’s no such thing, everything is relative, one man’s absolute belief is another man’s fairy tale; but about which we insist, we insist most emphatically, that it is too important an idea to give up to the relativity merchants.”

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

464. “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

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

— Salman Rushdie

466. “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

467. “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

468. “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

469. “What is heroism in our time? What is villainy? How much we have forgotten, if we don’t know the answer to such questions anymore.”

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

471. “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

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

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

476. “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

477. “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

478. “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

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

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

481. “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

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

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

484. “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

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

— Salman Rushdie

486. “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

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

— Salman Rushdie

488. “In the real world, immeasurable hurt is caused by terrorists based in Pakistan who attack countries like India.”

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

490. “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

491. “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

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

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

494. “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

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

— Salman Rushdie

496. “Civilsation is the sleight of hand that conceals our natures from ourselves.”

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

498. “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

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

— Salman Rushdie

500. “People must be protected from prejudice against their person. But people cannot be protected from prejudice against their ideas – because otherwise we’re all done.”

— Salman Rushdie