Top 500 Salman Rushdie Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “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

352. “Like everybody else, I’ve had relationships in which I was passionately in love but was completely miserable all the time and didn’t trust the person I was in love with one inch.”

— Salman Rushdie

353. “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

354. “The people suffering most from the Taliban were Afghans.”

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

356. “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

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

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

360. “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

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

— Salman Rushdie

362. “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

363. “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

364. “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

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

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

367. “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

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

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

371. “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

372. “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

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

— Salman Rushdie

374. “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

375. “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

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

— Salman Rushdie

377. “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

378. “I’ve never had very high regard for therapists. I owe my health, my mental survival, to my friends and loved ones.”

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

381. “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

382. “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

383. “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

384. “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

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

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

388. “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

389. “We know the force of gravity, but not its origins; and to explain why we become attached to our birthplaces we pretend that we are trees and speak of roots. Look under your feet. You will not find gnarled growths sprouting through the soles. Roots, I sometimes think, are a conservative myth, designed to keep us in our places.”

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

391. “He had picked up languages the way most sailors pick up diseases; languages were his gonorrhoea, his syphilis, his scurvy, his ague, his plague.”

— Salman Rushdie

392. “I’ve never rejected the world I came from. To be rejected by it is horrible.”

— Salman Rushdie

393. “I am clearly vulnerable to these more passionate and volatile unstable relationships. I am trying to not be so vulnerable.”

— Salman Rushdie

394. “Unhappy endings might seem more realistic than happy ones, but reality often contained a streak of fantasy that realism lacked.”

— Salman Rushdie

395. “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

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

— Salman Rushdie

397. “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

398. “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

399. “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

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

— Salman Rushdie