Top 500 Salman Rushdie Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “We crave permission openly to become our secret selves.”

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

203. “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

204. “His mother had survived decades of marriage to his angry, disappointed, alcoholic father by developing what she called a “forgettery” instead of a memory. She woke up every day and forgot the day before. He, too, seemed to lack a memory for trouble, and woke up remembering only what he yearned for. But he did not act upon his yearning. She had left for America and that was for the best.”

— Salman Rushdie

205. “What happened in Pakistan was that people were told: You’re all Muslim, so now you’re a country. As we saw in 1971 with the Bangladesh secession, the answer to that was: ‘Oh no, we’re not.’”

— Salman Rushdie

206. “Make no mistake- you can change things. Question everything, take nothing for granted; argue with all received ideas, don’t respect what does not deserve respect; speak your mind, don’t censor yourself; use your imagination and express what it tells you to express. These are the weapons of the mind.”

— Salman Rushdie

207. “The world, somebody wrote, is the place we prove real by dying in it.”

— Salman Rushdie

208. “No story comes from nowhere; new stories are born from old.”

— Salman Rushdie

209. “If you take a look at history, you will find that the understanding of what is good and evil has always existed before the individual religions. The religions were only invented by people afterwards, in order to express this idea.”

— Salman Rushdie

210. “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

211. “His beard was thick and red – and annoyed his mother, who said only Hajis, men who had made the pilgrimage to Mecca, should grow red beards. His hair, however, was rather darker. His sky-eyes you know about. Ingrid had said, “They went mad with the colors when they made your face.”

— Salman Rushdie

212. “Realism can break a writer’s heart.”

— Salman Rushdie

213. “Roots, I sometimes think, are a conservative myth, designed to keep us in our places.”

— Salman Rushdie

214. “The West should be tougher on Pakistan. It is trying to play both ends against the middle – to look like the friend of the revolutionaries on the one hand and a friend of the West in the fight against terrorism. It can’t be both things.”

— Salman Rushdie

215. “In early Islam, it was an absolute tenet that the prophet was not to be worshipped. The prophet was a messenger. And one of the things that’s happened in Islam is this cult of the prophet, which to my view is counter to the original tradition.”

— Salman Rushdie

216. “If I had simply wanted to trade on an insult to Islam, I could have done it in a sentence rather than writing a 250,000-word novel, a work of fiction.”

— Salman Rushdie

217. “I do not envy people who think they have a complete explanation of the world, for the simple reason that they are obviously wrong.”

— Salman Rushdie

218. “Rock and roll music – the music of freedom frightens people and unleashes all manner of conservative defense mechanisms.”

— Salman Rushdie

219. “It is commonly and, I believe, accurately said of Pakistan that her women are much more impressive than her men.”

— Salman Rushdie

220. “Your blasphemy, Salman, can’t be forgiven. To set your words against the Words of God.”

— Salman Rushdie

221. “There is no magic on earth strong enough to wipe out the legacies of one’s parents.”

— Salman Rushdie

222. “The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas – uncertainty, progress, change – into crimes.”

— Salman Rushdie

223. “Speaking as somebody with three sisters and a very largely female Muslim family, there is not a single woman I know in my family or in their friends who would have accepted the wearing of a veil.”

— Salman Rushdie

224. “Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.”

— Salman Rushdie

225. “I am on Facebook, but mainly as a way to spy on my children. I find out more about them from their Facebook pages than from what they tell me.”

— Salman Rushdie

226. “Free-form games in which the player can make choices about what the game is going to be, become a kind of gaming equivalent of the narrative possibility.”

— Salman Rushdie

227. “The acceptance that all that is solid has melted into the air, that reality and morality are not givens but imperfect human constructs, is the point from which fiction begins.”

— Salman Rushdie

228. “I only met Margaret Thatcher twice. The thing that I thought about meeting her was how extraordinarily intelligent she was. You really had to be on your game; otherwise, she’d make mincemeat of you.”

— Salman Rushdie

229. “Reality can have metaphorical content; that does not make it less real.”

— Salman Rushdie

230. “As human knowledge has grown, it has also become plain that every religious story ever told about how we got here is quite simply wrong. This, finally, is what all religions have in common. They didn’t get it right.”

— Salman Rushdie

231. “Our lives, our stories, flowed into one another’s, were no longer our own, individual, discrete.”

— Salman Rushdie

232. “India, the new myth – a collective fiction in which anything was possible, a fable rivalled only by the two other mighty fantasies: money and God.”

— Salman Rushdie

233. “Once you put a thought into the world, it can be disagreed with, but it can’t be unthought.”

— Salman Rushdie

234. “What one writer can make in the solitude of one room is something no power can easily destroy.”

— Salman Rushdie

235. “I saw Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Django Unchained,’ and you could say a lot of things against it, but it was incredible fun. I don’t like blood and gore, and I am very squeamish about violence, but Tarantino’s violence is actually funny.”

— Salman Rushdie

236. “In the end, rage, no matter how profoundly justified, destroys the enraged. Just as we are created anew by what we love, so we are reduced and unmade by what we hate.”

— Salman Rushdie

237. “I have had many more close women friends than men, and I’ve always assumed that comes from the fact that in my family there was such a disproportionate female element.”

— Salman Rushdie

238. “I think the book is less emotional than the film. With the film, the emotions are much more raw and in front. In the book, they are kind of ironized and seen through comedy.”

— Salman Rushdie

239. “My heart broke open and history fell in.”

— Salman Rushdie

240. “Between shame and shamelessness lies the axis upon which we turn; meteorological conditions at both these poles are of the most extreme, ferocious type. Shamelessness, shame: the roots of violence.”

— Salman Rushdie

241. “Too many people had spent too long demonizing or totemizing me to listen seriously to what I had to say.”

— Salman Rushdie

242. “In the experience of art, time seems not to exist. When I’m writing and think, “I’ve been working for two hours,” I’ve actually been working for seven.”

— Salman Rushdie

243. “Too many people spouting too many words, and in the end those words will turn to bullets and stones.”

— Salman Rushdie

244. “We are the only animals that tell stories to understand the world we live in.”

— Salman Rushdie

245. “Death and life were just adjacent verandas.”

— Salman Rushdie

246. “Many men start being friendly with women because they are trying to seduce them. I’m not trying to seduce them. I just like hanging out with them.”

— Salman Rushdie

247. “One of the things I’ve learnt is not to depend on there being a woman in your life to make it work. I love my work, I love my children, I’ve got wonderful friends, you know, I have a nice life.”

— Salman Rushdie

248. “Language upon a silvered tongue affords enchantment enough.”

— Salman Rushdie

249. “There is no alternative to the peaceful coexistence of cultures.”

— Salman Rushdie

250. “Human beings, you see, do absolutely two primary things. We see like and unlike. Like becomes, in literature, simile and metaphor. Unlike becomes uniqueness and difference, from which I believe, the novel is born.”

— Salman Rushdie