Top 500 Salman Rushdie Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “The people suffering most from the Taliban were Afghans.”

— Salman Rushdie

352. “Sometimes you find your voice by trying to write like people, and sometimes you find it by trying to write unlike people.”

— Salman Rushdie

353. “Religion is responsible for a lot of the problems in the history of the world and it’s not something that I practice or recommend, but to each his own.”

— Salman Rushdie

354. “Youth was often wretched, the struggle to become themselves tore the young to shreds, but sometimes, after the struggle, better days began.”

— Salman Rushdie

355. “The lessons one learns at school are not always the ones the school thinks it’s teaching.”

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

357. “Without water we are nothing”, the traveler thought. “Even an emperor, denied water, would swiftly turn to dust. Water is the real monarch and we are all its slaves.”

— Salman Rushdie

358. “Names, once they are in common use, quickly become mere sounds, their etymology being buried, like so many of the earth’s marvels, beneath the dust of habit.”

— Salman Rushdie

359. “Reading is a very different thing than performing. In fact, one of the things I think that doesn’t work in books on tape is if the person doing the reading “acts” too much; it becomes irritating to you listening to it.”

— Salman Rushdie

360. “I became a writer because I got addicted to story. The first storyteller in my life was my father.”

— Salman Rushdie

361. “What kind of God is it who’s upset by a cartoon in Danish?”

— Salman Rushdie

362. “Someone asked me if I was afraid to write my memoirs. I told him: ‘We have to stop drawing up accounts of fear! We live in a society in which people are allowed to tell their story, and that is what I do.’”

— Salman Rushdie

363. “The black ice of that dark fortress received the sunlight like a mortal wound.”

— Salman Rushdie

364. “I remember when I was young, many cities in the Muslim world were cosmopolitan cities with a lot of culture.”

— Salman Rushdie

365. “If a birth is the fall-out from the explosion caused by the union of two unstable elements, then perhaps a half-life is all we can expect.”

— Salman Rushdie

366. “The sixty-minute drama form has become very rich.”

— Salman Rushdie

367. “A people that has remained convinced of its greatness and invulnerability, that has chosen to believe such a myth in the face of all the evidence, is a people in the grip of a kind of sleep, or madness.”

— Salman Rushdie

368. “It’s Kennedy’s war, Vietnam. Lyndon Johnson got all the flak, but it’s Kennedy’s war.”

— Salman Rushdie

369. “Look at history. It’s not the account of a species at peace.”

— Salman Rushdie

370. “The writers of the French enlightenment had deliberately used blasphemy as a weapon, refusing to accept the power of the Church to set limiting points on thought.”

— Salman Rushdie

371. “The publishing of a book is a worldwide event. The attempt to suppress a book is a worldwide event.”

— Salman Rushdie

372. “I think the veil is a way of taking power away from women.”

— Salman Rushdie

373. “Hell is other people’s fantasies...”

— Salman Rushdie

374. “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

375. “I have always thought, the secret purpose of the book tour is to make the writer hate the book he’s written. And, as a result, drive him to write another book.”

— Salman Rushdie

376. “Terror is glamour – not only, but also. I am firmly convinced that there’s something like a fascination with death among suicide bombers.”

— Salman Rushdie

377. “It is often said by religious people that without its framework, there is no sense of right or wrong. My view is that religion comes after ethics.”

— Salman Rushdie

378. “Can one drown in one’s element... If fish can drown in water, can human beings suffocate in air?”

— Salman Rushdie

379. “Anyone who reads my work will see that there are often difficult relationships between fathers and sons.”

— Salman Rushdie

380. “For a fellow who’s not to much to look at, you have the instincts of a champion.”

— Salman Rushdie

381. “It may be that the books that were best liked in your lifetime are not the ones that are best liked 100 years later.”

— Salman Rushdie

382. “Wherever goodness lay, it did not lie in ritual, unthinking obeisance before a deity but rather, perhaps, in the slow clumsy, error-strewn working out of an individual or collective path.”

— Salman Rushdie

383. “My mother’s pregnancy, it seems, was fated; my birth, however, owed a good deal to accident.”

— Salman Rushdie

384. “All art began as sacred art, you know? I mean, all painting began as religious painting. All writing began as religious writing.”

— Salman Rushdie

385. “We must conclude that it is not only a particular political ideology that has failed, but the idea that men and women could ever define themselves in terms that exclude their spiritual needs.”

— Salman Rushdie

386. “And so it’s interesting to remember that when Mahatma Gandhi, the father of an earlier freedom movement, came to England and was asked what he thought of English civilization, he replied: ‘I think it would be a good idea.”

— Salman Rushdie

387. “I didn’t become a writer to write about me.”

— Salman Rushdie

388. “Bin Laden was born filthy rich and died in a rich man’s house, which he had painstakingly built to the highest specifications.”

— Salman Rushdie

389. “They drove past buses that dripped people the way a sponge drips water, and arrived at a thick forest of human beings, a crowd of people sprouting in all directions like leaves on jungle trees.”

— Salman Rushdie

390. “Discovery is fun. I am incredibly open to everything.”

— Salman Rushdie

391. “I don’t read my books, I write them. Once I’ve finished the many years it usually takes me to write them, I can’t bear to read them, because I’ve spent too long with them already. I’m not advertising them very well, am I?”

— Salman Rushdie

392. “The terrible fatalism which had overcome me of late had taken on an even more terrible form; drowning in the disintegration of family, of both countries to which I had belonged, of everything which can sanely be called real, lost in the sorrow of my filthy unrequited love, I sought out the oblivion of – I’m making it sound too noble; no otorund phrases must be used. Baldly, then: I rode the night-streets of the city, looking for death.”

— Salman Rushdie

393. “Easily found, easily gathered, lives were the small change of this world, and if you lost a few, it didn’t matter; there were always more.”

— Salman Rushdie

394. “The rich are obscure to us, finding ways to be unhappy when all the normal causes of unhappiness are removed.”

— Salman Rushdie

395. “Very often, people who actually pick up a book of mine for the first time are kind of surprised. And I get these letters saying, well, who knew that you were good, you know?”

— Salman Rushdie

396. “When we stop believing in the gods we can start believing in their stories.”

— Salman Rushdie

397. “I don’t want to admit that the savages are winning, that the jungle is creeping in and recapturing the civilized world – the jungle where the only law is the law of the jungle – but on many days every week that’s how it feels.”

— Salman Rushdie

398. “Once you have been in an earthquake you know, even if you survive without a scratch, that like a stroke in the heart, it remains in the earth’s breast, horribly potential, always promising to return, to hit you again, with an even more devastating force.”

— Salman Rushdie

399. “If bigots behave like bigots, it’s not a huge surprise.”

— Salman Rushdie

400. “I was very happy in Bombay. I was good at school. There was no reason to change anything. I suppose it must have been some spirit of adventure, of wanting to see the world.”

— Salman Rushdie