Top 500 Salman Rushdie Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “I get a lot of letters – a lot of letters saying, who knew that you were funny?”

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

254. “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

255. “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

256. “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

257. “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

258. “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

259. “What would a respectful political cartoon look like?”

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

262. “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

263. “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

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

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

267. “This is not what I had planned; but perhaps the story you finish is never the one you begin.”

— Salman Rushdie

268. “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

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

— Salman Rushdie

270. “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

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

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

273. “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

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

— Salman Rushdie

275. “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

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

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

278. “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

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

— Salman Rushdie

280. “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

281. “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

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

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

284. “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

285. “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

286. “If Woody Allen were a Muslim, he’d be dead by now.”

— Salman Rushdie

287. “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

288. “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

289. “I think anyone who knows me at all knows that I have been a movie addict all my life. I grew up in a city obsessed by cinema and where there are cinemas on every street corner.”

— Salman Rushdie

290. “And my grandfather, lurching upright, made a resolve. Stood. Rolled cheroot. Stared across the lake. And was knocked forever into that middle place, unable to worship a God in whose existence he could not wholly disbelieve. Permanent alteration: a hole.”

— Salman Rushdie

291. “It’s so disappointing, to put it mildly, that people know so much about my life. Because it means that they’re always trying to look at my books in terms of my life.”

— Salman Rushdie

292. “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

293. “After a winter’s gestation in its eggshell of ice, the valley had beaked its way out into the open, moist and yellow.”

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

295. “Throughout human history, the apostles of purity, those who have claimed to possess a total explanation, have wrought havoc among mere mixed-up human beings.”

— Salman Rushdie

296. “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

297. “The only privilege literature deserves – and this privilege it requires in order to exist – is the privilege of being in the arena of discourse, the place where the struggle of our languages can be acted out.”

— Salman Rushdie

298. “I don’t like books that play to the gallery, but I’ve become more concerned with telling a story as clearly and engagingly as I can.”

— Salman Rushdie

299. “Chekhov is this poet of melancholy and isolation and of wishing you were somewhere else than where you are.”

— Salman Rushdie

300. “You never know the answers to the questions of life until you are asked.”

— Salman Rushdie