Top 500 Salman Rushdie Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity.”

— Salman Rushdie

152. “Travel was pointless. It removed you from the place in which you had a meaning, and to which you gave meaning in return by dedicating your life to it, and it spirited you away into fairylands where you were, and looked, frankly absurd.”

— Salman Rushdie

153. “If somebody’s trying to shut you up, sing louder, and if possible, better.”

— Salman Rushdie

154. “The history of a culture can be determined by its untranslatable words.”

— Salman Rushdie

155. “Children are the vessels into which adults pour their poison.”

— Salman Rushdie

156. “Sometimes, people trying to commit suicide manage it in a manner that leaves them breathless with astonishment.”

— Salman Rushdie

157. “From birds she learned how to sing; from cats she learned a form of dangerous independence.”

— Salman Rushdie

158. “I admit it: above all things, I fear absurdity.”

— Salman Rushdie

159. “When Alice fell down the rabbit hole, it was an accident, but when she stepped through the looking glass, it was of her own free will, and a braver deed by far.”

— Salman Rushdie

160. “What kind of Christmas present would Jesus ask Santa for?”

— Salman Rushdie

161. “Believe in your own eyes and you’ll get into a lot of trouble, hot water, a mess.”

— Salman Rushdie

162. “Live on, survive, for the earth gives forth wonders. It may swallow your heart, but the wonders keep on coming. You stand before them bareheaded, shriven. What is expected of you is attention.”

— Salman Rushdie

163. “What grows best in the heat: fantasy; unreason; lust.”

— Salman Rushdie

164. “I seem to have fallen for women with missing parents. Goodness knows what it signifies.”

— Salman Rushdie

165. “One of the things I’ve thought about ‘Midnight’s Children’ is that it is a novel which puts a Muslim family at the centre of the Indian experience.”

— Salman Rushdie

166. “We walk unknowing amid the shadows of our past and, forgetting our history, are ignorant of ourselves.”

— Salman Rushdie

167. “My love for Dan Brown knows no bounds. It literally has no mass.”

— Salman Rushdie

168. “We must agree on what matters: kissing in public places, bacon sandwiches, disagreement, cutting-edge fashion, literature, generosity, water, a more equitable distribution of the world’s resources, movies, music, freedom of thought, beauty, love.”

— Salman Rushdie

169. “Don’t you know girls have to fool people every day of their lives if they want to get anywhere?”

— Salman Rushdie

170. “Not all possibilities are open to us. The world is finite; our hopes spill over its rim.”

— Salman Rushdie

171. “Where there is no belief, there is no blasphemy.”

— Salman Rushdie

172. “A poet’s work,’ he answers. ‘To name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep.’ And if rivers of blood flow from the cuts his verses inflict, then they will nourish him. He is the satirist, Baal.”

— Salman Rushdie

173. “For an instant, silence, noisier than a waterfall.”

— Salman Rushdie

174. “I do think of Bombay as my hometown. Those are the streets I walked when I was learning to walk. And it’s the place that my imagination has returned to more than anywhere else.”

— Salman Rushdie

175. “One of the reasons my name is Rushdie is that my father was an admirer of Ibn Rush’d, the 12th century Arab philosopher known as Averroes in the West. In his time, he was making the non-literalist case for interpreting the Koran.”

— Salman Rushdie

176. “We who have grown up on a diet of honour and shame can still grasp what must seem unthinkable to people living in the aftermath of the death of God and of tragedy: that men will sacrifice their dearest love on the implacable altars of their pride.”

— Salman Rushdie

177. “I don’t think people cry reading ‘Midnight’s Children,’ but a lot of people seem to cry watching the movie.”

— Salman Rushdie

178. “Everything has shape, if you look for it. There is no escape from form.”

— Salman Rushdie

179. “AS I PLAN MY QUEST,” Quichotte said, drinking from a can of ginger ale, “I ponder the contemporary period as well as the classical. And by the contemporary I mean, of course, The Bachelorette.”

— Salman Rushdie

180. “One either loves, or waits for love, or banishes love for good. That is the full range of possible choices.”

— Salman Rushdie

181. “I know that when people pull apart, they usually employ misunderstanding as a weapon, deliberately getting hold of the stick’s wrong end, impaling themselves on its point in order to prove the perfidy of the other.”

— Salman Rushdie

182. “The inevitable triumph of illusion over reality that was the single most obvious truth about the history of the human race.”

— Salman Rushdie

183. “The Christian Coalition is still about Christianity, even if it’s an idea of Christianity that many Christians might not go along with.”

— Salman Rushdie

184. “The worst, most insidious effect of censorship is that, in the end, it can deaden the imagination of the people. Where there is no debate, it is hard to go on remembering, every day, that there is a suppressed side to every argument.”

— Salman Rushdie

185. “One minute you’ve got a lucky star watching over you and the next instant it’s done a bunk.”

— Salman Rushdie

186. “The enemy for the fanatic is pleasure, which makes it extremely important to continue to indulge in pleasure. Dance madly. That is how you get rid of terrorism.”

— Salman Rushdie

187. “O, Need’s a funny fish: it makes people untruthful. They all suffer from it, but they will not always admit.”

— Salman Rushdie

188. “So India’s problem turns out to be the world’s problem. What happened in India has happened in God’s name. The problem’s name is God.”

— Salman Rushdie

189. “Fundamentalism isn’t about religion, it’s about power.”

— Salman Rushdie

190. “A photograph is a moral decision taken in one eighth of a second, or one sixteenth, or one one-hundred-and-twenty-eighth. Snap your fingers; a snapshot’s faster.”

— Salman Rushdie

191. “An attack upon our ability to tell stories is not just censorship – it is a crime against our nature as human beings.”

— Salman Rushdie

192. “Friendships are the family we make – not the one we inherit. I’ve always been someone to whom friendship, elective affinities, is as important as family.”

— Salman Rushdie

193. “Actually, I don’t even like parties. I would much prefer a room with four friends who sit around and have dinner. I detest nightclubs. And I don’t like places where the noise is so loud you can’t talk to people.”

— Salman Rushdie

194. “If my child had prejudice in his head, I’d be ashamed. I would see it as my failure as a parent.”

— Salman Rushdie

195. “But love is what we want, not freedom. Who then is the unluckier man? The beloved, who is given his heart’s desire and must for ever after fear its loss, or the free man, with his unlooked-for liberty, naked and alone between the captive armies of the earth?”

— Salman Rushdie

196. “Originality is dangerous. It challenges, questions, overturns assumptions, unsettles moral codes.”

— Salman Rushdie

197. “I am gagged and imprisoned. I can’t even speak. I want to kick a football in a park with my son. Ordinary, banal life: my impossible dream.”

— Salman Rushdie

198. “I’ve never read anything so badly written that got published. It made ‘Twilight’ look like ‘War and Peace.’”

— Salman Rushdie

199. “The whole story of migration and what that has done in interconnecting the planet is obviously something I’ve written about a lot.”

— Salman Rushdie

200. “The city of Jahilia is built entirely of sand, its structures formed of the desert whence it rises. It is a sight to wonder at: walled, four-gated, the whole of it a miracle worked by its citizens, who have learned the trick of transforming the fine white dune-sand of those forsaken parts, – the very stuff of inconstancy, – the quintessence of unsettlement, shifting, treachery, lack-of-form, – and have turned it, by alchemy, into the fabric of their newly invented permanence.”

— Salman Rushdie