Top 500 Salman Rushdie Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “I’m not saying I am never going to fall in love again, but there is no need to marry.”

— Salman Rushdie

52. “Free speech is life itself.”

— Salman Rushdie

53. “It is very, very easy not to be offended by a book. You just have to shut it.”

— Salman Rushdie

54. “The process of revision should be constant and endless.”

— Salman Rushdie

55. “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

56. “Between the adored and the adorer falls the shadow.”

— Salman Rushdie

57. “American literature has always been immigrant.”

— Salman Rushdie

58. “If there is a choice between absolute safety and freedom, then freedom must always prevail.”

— Salman Rushdie

59. “All names mean something.”

— Salman Rushdie

60. “Even when things are at their worst, there’s a little voice in your head saying, ‘Good story!’”

— Salman Rushdie

61. “A sigh isn’t just a sigh. We inhale the world and breathe out meaning. While we can. While we can.”

— Salman Rushdie

62. “Life is lived forward but is judged in reverse.”

— Salman Rushdie

63. “When ‘Midnight’s Children’ came out, people in the West tended to respond to the fantasy elements in the novel, to praise it in those terms. In India, people read it like a history book.”

— Salman Rushdie

64. “Stories in families are colossally important. Every family has stories: some funny, some proud, some embarrassing, some shameful. Knowing them is proof of belonging to the family.”

— Salman Rushdie

65. “One of the things a writer is for is to say the unsayable, speak the unspeakable and ask difficult questions.”

— Salman Rushdie

66. “It is literature which for me opened the mysterious and decisive doors of imagination and understanding. To see the way others see. To think the way others think. And above all, to feel.”

— Salman Rushdie

67. “I must finish what I’ve started, even if, inevitably, what I finish turns out not to be what I began.”

— Salman Rushdie

68. “The only thing worse than a bad review from the Ayatollah Khomeini would be a good review from the Ayatollah Khomeini.”

— Salman Rushdie

69. “I do think that there is such a thing as human nature, and that the things that we have in common are perhaps greater than the things that divide us.”

— Salman Rushdie

70. “A figure of speech is a shifty thing; it can be twisted or it can be straight.”

— Salman Rushdie

71. “Masks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull.”

— Salman Rushdie

72. “What’s real and what’s true aren’t necessarily the same.”

— Salman Rushdie

73. “She’s no flibberti-gibberti mamzell, but a whir-stir-get-lost-sir bundla dynamite!”

— Salman Rushdie

74. “A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return.”

— Salman Rushdie

75. “I am certainly not a good Muslim. But I am able now to say that I am Muslim; in fact it is a source of happiness to say that I am now inside, and a part of the community whose values have always been closest to my heart.”

— Salman Rushdie

76. “Question: What is the opposite of faith? Not disbelief. Too final, certain, closed. Itself is a kind of belief. Doubt.”

— Salman Rushdie

77. “One of the problems with defending free speech is you often have to defend people that you find to be outrageous and unpleasant and disgusting.”

— Salman Rushdie

78. “Freedom is not a tea party, India. Freedom is a war.”

— Salman Rushdie

79. “A thing that happens to migrants is that they lose many of the traditional things which root identity, which root the self.”

— Salman Rushdie

80. “What’s the use of stories that aren’t even true?”

— Salman Rushdie

81. “That’s the trouble with you sad-city types: a place has to be miserable and dull as ditchwater before you believe it’s real.”

— Salman Rushdie

82. “Peace, perfect peace, in this dark world of sin? The Blood of Jesus whispers peace within.”

— Salman Rushdie

83. “Go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets. Take a deep breath before you begin...”

— Salman Rushdie

84. “When you have children, your perspective on the parent-child relationship alters.”

— Salman Rushdie

85. “Human beings do not perceive things whole; we are not gods but wounded creatures, cracked lenses, capably only of fractured perceptions. Partial beings, in all the senses of that phrase.”

— Salman Rushdie

86. “I will come back to India – so deal with it.”

— Salman Rushdie

87. “I used to say, ‘There is a God-shaped hole in me.’ For a long time I stressed the absence, the hole. Now I find it is the shape which has become more important.”

— Salman Rushdie

88. “A poet’s work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.”

— Salman Rushdie

89. “Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts.”

— Salman Rushdie

90. “Captain Ahab drowned, he reminded himself; it was the trimmer, Ishmael, who survived.”

— Salman Rushdie

91. “You will see, as time goes by”, said Ibn Rushd, “that in the end it will be religion that will make men turn away from God. The godly are God’s worst advocates.”

— Salman Rushdie

92. “I beat my sons in real-life table tennis, but virtually, I get murdered. I download games on the iPhone that I’m addicted to – I’m a master at “Angry Birds.””

— Salman Rushdie

93. “The liveliness of literature lies in its exceptionality, in being the individual, idiosyncratic vision of one human being, in which, to our delight and great surprise, we may find our own vision reflected.”

— Salman Rushdie

94. “It was the resilience in human beings that represented their best chance of survival, their ability to look the unimaginable, the unconscionable, the unprecedented in the eye.”

— Salman Rushdie

95. “Memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else’s version more than his own.”

— Salman Rushdie

96. “Shame is like everything else; live with it for long enough and it becomes part of the furniture.”

— Salman Rushdie

97. “From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable. He moves in mysterious ways: men say. Small wonder, then, that women have turned to me.”

— Salman Rushdie

98. “With death comes honesty.”

— Salman Rushdie

99. “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

100. “Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems – but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible.”

— Salman Rushdie