Top 500 Salman Rushdie Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “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

Featured in: Book Quotes

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

— Salman Rushdie

253. “If the culture shifts, if people think differently about women, the art will shift, too. You can’t ask art to make social change. It’s not what it’s for.”

— Salman Rushdie

254. “Honesty is not the best policy in life. Only, perhaps, in art.”

— Salman Rushdie

255. “The Pages of Gup, now that they had talked through everything so fully, fought hard, remained united, support each other when required to do so, and in general looked like a force with a common purpose. All those arguments and debates, all that openness, had created powerful bonds of friendship between them.”

— Salman Rushdie

256. “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

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

— Salman Rushdie

258. “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

259. “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

Featured in: Fun Quotes

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

— Salman Rushdie

261. “I’m not a very big fan of ‘Slumdog Millionaire.’ I think it’s visually brilliant. But I have problems with the story line. I find the storyline unconvincing.”

— Salman Rushdie

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

262. “BE A LAWYER in a lawless time was like being a clown among the humorless: which was to say, either completely redundant or absolutely essential.”

— Salman Rushdie

263. “Human beings understand themselves and shape their futures by arguing and challenging and questioning and saying the un-sayable, not by bowing the knee whether to gods or to men.”

— Salman Rushdie

264. “I stand with Charlie Hebdo, as we all must, to defend the art of satire.”

— Salman Rushdie

265. “There is nothing like a War for the reinvention of lives...”

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

267. “I fell victim to the temptation of every autobiographer, to the illusion that since the past exists only in one’s memories and the words which strive vainly to encapsulate them, it is possible to create past events simply by saying they occurred.”

— Salman Rushdie

268. “There is nothing intrinsic linking any religion with any act of violence. The crusades don’t prove that Christianity was violent. The Inquisition doesn’t prove that Christianity tortures people. But that Christianity did torture people.”

— Salman Rushdie

269. “The Muslim population in India is, largely speaking, not radicalised. From the beginning, they were always very secular-minded.”

— Salman Rushdie

270. “Few topographical boundaries can rival the frontiers of the mind.”

— Salman Rushdie

271. “To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world.”

— Salman Rushdie

272. “When I was growing up, everyone around me was fond of fooling around with words. It was certainly common in my family, but I think it is typical of Bombay, and maybe of India, that there is a sense of play in the way people use language.”

— Salman Rushdie

273. “I get a lot of letters – a lot of letters saying, who knew that you were funny?”

— Salman Rushdie

274. “I grew up reading ‘The Jungle Books’ and loving them.”

— Salman Rushdie

Featured in: Book Quotes, Reading Quotes

275. “The thing that I think was very brave of my younger self was that he decided he would be an idiot. Just persevere. That feels brave to me: deciding that I’m going to damn well be this person that I’ve set my heart on being.”

— Salman Rushdie

276. “To see things plainly, you have to cross a frontier.”

— Salman Rushdie

277. “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. It may take a thousand and one years but in the end religion will shrivel away and only then will we begin to live in God’s truth.”

— Salman Rushdie

278. “If I were asked for a one-sentence sound bite on religion, I would say I was against it.”

— Salman Rushdie

279. “I don’t think there is a need for an entity like God in my life.”

— Salman Rushdie

280. “The Republicans were not always insane. They might’ve had politics I didn’t agree with, but they weren’t always actually certifiable.”

— Salman Rushdie

281. “I make no complaint. I am a writer. I do not accept my condition; I will strive to change it; but I inhabit it, I am trying to learn from it.”

— Salman Rushdie

282. “The history of life was not the bumbling progress – the very English, middle-class progress – Victorian thought had wanted it to be, but violent, a thing of dramatic, cumulative transformations: in the old formulation, more revolution than evolution.”

— Salman Rushdie

283. “You can’t judge an internal injury by the size of the hole.”

— Salman Rushdie

284. “Obviously, a rigid, blinkered, absolutist world view is the easiest to keep hold of, whereas the fluid, uncertain, metamorphic picture I’ve always carried about is rather more vulnerable.”

— Salman Rushdie

285. “Free societies are societies in motion, and with motion comes friction.”

— Salman Rushdie

286. “We are described into corners, and then we must describe ourselves out of corners.”

— Salman Rushdie

287. “All of us are in two stories at the same time,” said the sandwich lady. “Life and Times. There is our own personal story, and the bigger story of what’s happening around us. When both are in trouble simultaneously, when the crisis inside you intersects with the crisis outside you, things get a little crazy.”

— Salman Rushdie

288. “Doubt, it seems to me, is the central condition of a human being in the twentieth century.”

— Salman Rushdie

289. “I’ve met the Dalai Lama briefly, but I would probably say my grandfather was the wisest person I ever met. He was my mother’s father, an Indian, a family doctor, and very unlike me in that he was deeply religious.”

— Salman Rushdie

290. “What you were is forever who you are.”

— Salman Rushdie

291. “Why speak if you can’t manage perfect thoughts, perfect sentences?”

— Salman Rushdie

292. “Sometimes I think that when people become famous, there’s a public perception that they are not human beings any more. They don’t have feelings; they don’t get hurt; you can act and say as you like about them.”

— Salman Rushdie

293. “My first novel – the novel I wrote before ‘Midnight’s Children’ – feels, to me, now, very – I mean, I get embarrassed when I see people reading it. You know, there are some people who, bizarrely, like it. Which I’m, you know, I’m happy for.”

— Salman Rushdie

Featured in: Reading Quotes

294. “I’ll tell you what divorce hasn’t taught me. It didn’t teach me not to get married again.”

— Salman Rushdie

295. “The glamour of being forbidden must not be underestimated.”

— Salman Rushdie

296. “Nobody wants to read a 600 page book in which the author is fabulous throughout.”

— Salman Rushdie

297. “By the end of the Latin lesson he was a hard-line atheist, and to prove it, he marched determinedly into the school tuckshop during break and bought himself a ham sandwich. The flesh of the swine passed his lips for the first time that day, and the failure of the Almighty to strike him dead with a thunderbolt proved to him what he had long suspected: that there was nobody up there with thunderbolts to hurl.”

— Salman Rushdie

298. “He remembered the old Chinese proverb, sometimes ascribed to Confucius: If you sit by the river for long enough, the body of your enemy will float by.”

— Salman Rushdie

299. “I have to say that after some initial resistance, I’m now a complete ‘Game of Thrones’ addict.”

— Salman Rushdie

300. “Only the foolish, blinded by language’s conventions, think of fire as red or gold. Fire is blue at it’s melancholy rim, green in it’s envious heart. It may burn white, or even, in it’s greatest rages, black.”

— Salman Rushdie