Top 500 Salman Rushdie Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Out-of-step intellectuals like Noam Chomsky and the deceased Edward Said have often been dismissed as crazy extremists, ‘anti-American,’ and in Mr. Said’s case even, absurdly, as apologists for Palestinian ‘terrorism.’”

— Salman Rushdie

102. “What kind of idea are you? Are you the kind that compromises, does deals, accomodates itself to society, aims to find a niche, to survive; or are you the cussed, bloody-minded, ramrod-backed type of damnfool notion that would rather break than sway with the breeze? – The kind that will almost certainly, ninety-nine times out of hundred, be smashed to bits; but, the hundredth time, will change the world.”

— Salman Rushdie

103. “You can find shame in every house, burning in an ashtray, hanging framed upon a wall, covering a bed. But nobody notices it any more.”

— Salman Rushdie

104. “Love is spring after winter. It comes to heal life’s wounds, inflicted by the unloving cold.”

— Salman Rushdie

105. “Every time you finish a book, you have a terrible feeling that there’s just never going to be another one. But fortunately, so far, the next one has always shown up.”

— Salman Rushdie

106. “One of the extraordinary things about human events is that the unthinkable becomes thinkable.”

— Salman Rushdie

107. “Who what am I? My answer: I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I’ve gone which would not have happened if I had not come. Nor am I particularly exceptional in this matter; each ‘I’, every one of the now-six-hundred-million-plus of us, contains a similar multitude. I repeat for the last time: to understand me, you’ll have to swallow the world.”

— Salman Rushdie

108. “O the shame of it, the humiliating shame of being condescended to by dolts.”

— Salman Rushdie

109. “So when I studied history at Cambridge, I did a special subject in that, exactly that. And then actually that – while I was studying it was where I came across the so-called incident of the satanic verses.”

— Salman Rushdie

110. “In the end, you write the book that grabs you by the throat and demands to be written.”

— Salman Rushdie

111. “I had a very difficult relationship with my father, which ended up okay, but there were many difficult years.”

— Salman Rushdie

112. “I have been a film buff all my life and believe that the finest cinema is fully the equal of the best novels.”

— Salman Rushdie

113. “The problem’s name is God.”

— Salman Rushdie

114. “Religion, a medieval form of unreason, when combined with modern weaponry becomes a real threat to our freedoms. This religious totalitarianism has caused a deadly mutation in the heart of Islam and we see the tragic consequences in Paris today.”

— Salman Rushdie

115. “Airport security exists to guard us against terrorist attacks.”

— Salman Rushdie

116. “In this world without quiet corners, there can be no easy escapes from history, from hullabaloo, from terrible, unquiet fuss.”

— Salman Rushdie

117. “When I’m writing a book, sentence by sentence, I’m not thinking theoretically. I’m just trying to work out the story from inside the characters I’ve got.”

— Salman Rushdie

118. “One of the strange things about violent and authoritarian regimes is they don’t like the glare of negative publicity.”

— Salman Rushdie

119. “It’s one thing to say, ‘I don’t like what you said to me and I find it rude and offensive,’ but the moment you threaten violence in return, you’ve taken it to another level, where you lose whatever credibility you had.”

— Salman Rushdie

120. “The difference between memoir and autobiography, as far as I see it, is that a memoir is there primarily to tell one particular story, whereas an autobiography tries to be a full account of a life.”

— Salman Rushdie

121. “The world is full of things that upset people. But most of us deal with it and move on and don’t try and burn the planet down.”

— Salman Rushdie

122. “When I’m writing books, something weird happens; and the result is the books contain a large amount of what you could call ‘supernaturalism.’ As a writer, I find I need that to explain the world I’m writing about.”

— Salman Rushdie

123. “If you want pay, then just be gay.”

— Salman Rushdie

124. “Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory.”

— Salman Rushdie

125. “The answer to religion is not no religion, but another way of thinking of it. Another way of being in it.”

— Salman Rushdie

126. “Is birth always a fall?”

— Salman Rushdie

127. “Impossible stories, stories with No Entry signs on them, change our lives, and our minds, as often as the authorized versions, the stories we are expected to trust, upon which we are asked, or told, to build our judgements, and our lives.”

— Salman Rushdie

128. “I think it’s a very important function of art to challenge accepted reality, especially when that reality is created by powerful interest groups.”

— Salman Rushdie

129. “I’m definitely post-something.”

— Salman Rushdie

130. “I did a lot of student acting when I was young.”

— Salman Rushdie

131. “The frustrating part of being tagged ‘controversial’ is people go looking for trouble where there isn’t any to look for.”

— Salman Rushdie

132. “In the end, rage, no matter how profoundly justified, destroys the enraged.”

— Salman Rushdie

133. “Until you know who you are you can’t write.”

— Salman Rushdie

134. “The fact of being alive compensated for what life did to one.”

— Salman Rushdie

135. “Life is elsewhere. Cross frontiers. Fly away.”

— Salman Rushdie

136. “Nothing comes from nothing, Thieflet; no story comes from nowhere; new stories are born from old – it is the new combinations that make them new.”

— Salman Rushdie

137. “No, I don’t think it’s fair to label Islam ‘violent.’ But I will say that to my knowledge, no writer has ever gone into hiding for criticizing the Amish.”

— Salman Rushdie

138. “Home has become such a scattered, damaged, various concept in our present travails. There is so much to yearn for. There are so few rainbows any more.”

— Salman Rushdie

139. “Madame Bovary and a flying carpet, they are both untrue in the same way. Somebody made them up.”

— Salman Rushdie

140. “Things, even people have a way of leaking into each other like flavours when you cook.”

— Salman Rushdie

141. “The First Amendment defends all forms of speech including hate speech, which is why groups like Ku Klux Klan are allowed to utter their poisonous remarks.”

— Salman Rushdie

142. “When I was writing ‘The Satanic Verses,’ if you had asked me about the phenomenon that we all now know as radical Islam, I wouldn’t have had much to say. As recently as the mid-1980s, it didn’t seem to be a big deal.”

— Salman Rushdie

143. “Literature is the one place in any society where, within the secrecy of our own heads, we can hear voices talking about everything in every possible way.”

— Salman Rushdie

144. “British society has never been cleansed of the filth of imperialism.”

— Salman Rushdie

145. “Having been borne across the world, we are translated men. It is normally supposed that something always gets lost in translation; I cling, obstinately, to the notion that something can also be gained.”

— Salman Rushdie

146. “Five mysteries hold the keys to the unseen: the act of love, and the birth of a baby, and the contemplation of great art, and being in the presence of death or disaster, and hearing the human voice lifted in song.”

— Salman Rushdie

147. “He knew what he knew: that the real world was full of magic, so magical worlds could easily be real.”

— Salman Rushdie

148. “But but but what is the point of giving persons Freedom of Speech,’ declaimed Butt the Hoopoe, ’if you then say they must not utilize same? And is not the Power of Speech the greatest Power of all? Then surely it must be exercised to the full?”

— Salman Rushdie

149. “I’m a big-city boy. What I like is big cities. It’s not just what I like. It’s what I write about.”

— Salman Rushdie

150. “I learned: the first lesson of my life: nobody can face the world with his eyes open all the time.”

— Salman Rushdie