Top 500 Salman Rushdie Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “PLEASE BELIEVE that I am falling apart.”

— Salman Rushdie

302. “All over the world great writers were dying young: Italo Calvino, Raymond Carver, and now here was Angela wrestling with the Reaper. A fatwa was not the only way to die. There were older types of death sentence that still worked very well.”

— Salman Rushdie

303. “I’ve always prided myself on my discipline as a writer. I do it like a job. I get up in the morning and go to my desk.”

— Salman Rushdie

304. “Many of us persons of the tinted persuasion care about human rights and artistic freedom too.”

— Salman Rushdie

305. “I have no problem with people’s religious beliefs. I just don’t happen to have any.”

— Salman Rushdie

306. “In Iran, fundamentalism was fuelled to an extent by the regime of the Shah being supported by the West.”

— Salman Rushdie

307. “Have you noticed the physical resemblance between Imran Khan and Gaddafi? If you were making a movie of the life of Gaddafi and you wanted a slightly better-looking version of Gaddafi, you might cast Imran Khan.”

— Salman Rushdie

308. “The mistake of the West was to put the Sauds on the throne of Saudi Arabia and give them control of the world’s oil fortune, which they then used to propagate Wahhabi Islam.”

— Salman Rushdie

309. “They are the Eggheads. He is the Walrus.”

— Salman Rushdie

310. “You don’t that often see writers being sought out when there are matters of great moment to discuss. And I think that’s a loss.”

— Salman Rushdie

311. “We all dream things into being; you imagine yourself having a child, and then you have a child. An inventor will think of something in his mind and then make it actual. So things are often passing from the imagined realm into the real world.”

— Salman Rushdie

312. “To be born again, first you have to die.”

— Salman Rushdie

313. “Matthew Wiener on ‘Mad Men’ writes the entire series before they start shooting, and if you have that, then what you can do with character and story is not at all unlike what you can do in a novel.”

— Salman Rushdie

314. “Once you get that instinct for the fictiveness, the fictionality of fiction, it kind of sets you free.”

— Salman Rushdie

315. “Censorship is the thing that stops you doing what you want to do, and what writers want to talk about is what they do, not what stops them doing it.”

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

318. “Did you know, ji,’ Zulu offered, ’that the map of Tolkien’s Middle earth fits quite well over central England and Wales? Maybe all fairylands are right here, in our midst.”

— Salman Rushdie

319. “And lo, there, immediately, was god, and he was furious. ‘How did you come up with the idea of me,’ he demanded, ‘who asked you to do that?’ and he threw them out of the garden, into, of all places, Iraq. ‘No good deed goes unpunished,’ said Eve to Adam, and that ought to be the motto of the entire human race. The.”

— Salman Rushdie

320. “People don’t like being around despair. Our tolerance for the truly hopeless, for those who are irredeemably broken by life is strictly limited. The sob stories we like are the ones that end before we’re bored.”

— Salman Rushdie

321. “Cruelty is not a literary value.”

— Salman Rushdie

322. “The Koran was revealed at a time of great change in the Arab world, the seventh-century shift from a matriarchal nomadic culture to an urban patriarchal system.”

— Salman Rushdie

323. “In general, writers shouldn’t be killed for what they write, though I can think of exceptions.”

— Salman Rushdie

324. “If there were Israeli attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities, it makes it certain there would be a reprisal attack against the United States at some point.”

— Salman Rushdie

325. “The only way of living in a free society is to feel that you have the right to say and do stuff.”

— Salman Rushdie

326. “The Chinese are good at repression and can be pretty ruthless about it.”

— Salman Rushdie

327. “A man who catches History’s eye is thereafter bound to a mistress from whom he will never escape.”

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

329. “The suicide bomber’s imagination leads him to believe in a brilliant act of heroism, when in fact he is simply blowing himself up pointlessly and taking other people’s lives.”

— Salman Rushdie

330. “It’s obvious that I come down on the side of free speech for anybody’s work.”

— Salman Rushdie

331. “What I’ve always seen in writers and artists is the courage it takes to make an original work of art. I think the real risks in literature are linguistic and intellectual, and I hope we can highlight those, as well as political courage.”

— Salman Rushdie

332. “Anyone who has had the experience of going through American security checks knows the purpose of these checks is not to make you safer; it’s just to annoy you.”

— Salman Rushdie

333. “Our lives teach us who we are.” I have learned the hard way that when you permit anyone else’s description of reality to supplant your own... then you might as well be dead.”

— Salman Rushdie

334. “Scraps of memory: this is not how a climax should be written. A climax should surge towards its Himalayan peak; but I am left with shreds, and must jerk towards my crisis like a puppet with broken strings. This is not what I had planned; but perhaps the story you finish is never the one you begin.”

— Salman Rushdie

335. “I write books I’d enjoy reading, I’m the reader standing behind my shoulder.”

— Salman Rushdie

336. “Freedom to reject is the only freedom.”

— Salman Rushdie

337. “Before I came to England, my favorite authors were P. G. Wodehouse and Agatha Christie. I used to devour both.”

— Salman Rushdie

338. “You start at the stupid end of the book, and if you’re lucky you finish at the smart end.”

— Salman Rushdie

339. “Original thought, original artistic expression is by its very nature questioning, irreverent, iconoclastic.”

— Salman Rushdie

340. “I have always thought that these two ways of talking, one is the fantastic, the fable, the fairy tale, and the other being history, the scholarly study of what happened, I think they’re both amazing ways to understand human nature.”

— Salman Rushdie

341. “It just requires so much of you, and most of the time you feel dumb.”

— Salman Rushdie

342. “People are always telling me that they’ve seen people reading my books on the subway, or the beach, or whenever.”

— Salman Rushdie

343. “A relationship with an imaginary woman is preferable to a relationship with a real one.”

— Salman Rushdie

344. “My horizon’s have shrunk and I have only endings to write.”

— Salman Rushdie

345. “We were all trapped in stories, she said, just as he used to say, his wavy hair, his naughty smile, his beautiful mind, each of us the prisoner of our own solipsistic narrative, each family the captive of the family story, each community locked within its own tale of itself, each people the victims of their own versions of history, and there were parts of the world where the narratives collided and went to war, where there were two or more incompatible stories fighting for space on, to speak, the same page.”

— Salman Rushdie

346. “I think that England made a very big, historical mistake to allow itself to become the kind of terrorist capital of the world.”

— Salman Rushdie

347. “What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry.”

— Salman Rushdie

348. “I would argue that religion comes from a desire to get to the questions of, ‘Where do we come from?’ and ‘How shall we live?’ And I would say I don’t need religion to answer those questions.”

— Salman Rushdie

349. “Be sure that you go to the author to get at his meaning, not to find yours.”

— Salman Rushdie

350. “Nothing is forever, he thought beyond closed eyelids somewhere over Asia Minor. Maybe unhappiness is the continuum through which a human life moves, and joy just a series of blips, of islands in the stream. Or if not unhappiness, then at least melancholy.”

— Salman Rushdie