Top 500 Salman Rushdie Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “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

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

— Salman Rushdie

403. “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

404. “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

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

— Salman Rushdie

406. “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

407. “I think that a lot of us, whether we are religious or not – there are no words to express some things except religious words. For instance, ‘soul.’”

— Salman Rushdie

408. “If you walk away from God you should probably try to stay in the good books of Luck.”

— Salman Rushdie

409. “And so, out of bloody-mindedness, I had said the word, and we went for the first time, into those Bombay Central alleys that have no name. Lamba introduced me simply as ‘The Moor’, and because I came with him there was less contempt than I had expected.”

— Salman Rushdie

410. “It has been observed that all Americans need a frontier: pain was hers, and she was determined to push it out.”

— Salman Rushdie

411. “Children like being a little scared, but they don’t want to be disturbed.”

— Salman Rushdie

412. “England in a way is lucky. It’s an island, so the frontiers are given by the sea.”

— Salman Rushdie

413. “The way you write a screenplay is that you close your eyes and run the movie in your head and then you write it down.”

— Salman Rushdie

414. “In the waking dreams our societies permit, in our myths, our arts, our songs, we celebrate the nonbelongers, the different ones, the outlaws, the freaks.”

— Salman Rushdie

415. “Such is the miraculous nature of the future of exiles: what is first uttered in the impotence of an overheated apartment becomes the fate of nations.”

— Salman Rushdie

416. “History could claw upward as well as down. The powerful could be deafened by the cries of the poor.”

— Salman Rushdie

417. “The problem of telling contemporary history is that your message gets outdated.”

— Salman Rushdie

418. “Our lives are not what we deserve; they are, let us agree, in many ways deficient.”

— Salman Rushdie

419. “There’s a lot of conflict and darkness inside everybody’s family. We all pretend to outsiders that it’s not so, but behind locked doors, there are usually high emotions running.”

— Salman Rushdie

420. “The great concern is that year after year, rising numbers of journalists are being killed in pursuit of their work. They are increasingly seen as not being neutral but rather as combatants by one side or the other.”

— Salman Rushdie

421. “I’m a world expert on superhero comics. I think maybe only Michael Chabon knows more than me.”

— Salman Rushdie

422. “What is heroism in our time? What is villainy? How much we have forgotten, if we don’t know the answer to such questions anymore.”

— Salman Rushdie

423. “In these parts,’ rejoined blue-bearded Iff, ‘I am having my time wasted by a Disconnector Thief who will not trust in what he can’t see. How much have you seen, eh, Thieflet? Africa, have you seen it? No? Then is it truly there? And submarines? Huh? Also hailstones, baseballs, pagodas? Goldmines? Kangaroos, Mount Fujiyama, the North Pole? And the past, did it happen? And the future, will it come? Believe in your own eyes and you’ll get into a lot of trouble, hot water, a mess.”

— Salman Rushdie

424. “Who am I? Let’s put it this way: who has the best tunes?”

— Salman Rushdie

425. “America had left reality behind and entered the comic-book universe.”

— Salman Rushdie

426. “India is my kid sister.”

— Salman Rushdie

427. “This is what I am not: I am not one thing. I contain multitudes.”

— Salman Rushdie

428. “We, the public, are easily, lethally offended. We have come to think of taking offence as a fundamental right. We value very little more highly than our rage, which gives us, in our opinion, the moral high ground. From this high ground we can shoot down at our enemies and inflict heavy fatalities. We take pride in our short fuses. Our anger elevates, transcends.”

— Salman Rushdie

429. “I have never really thought of myself as a writer about religion. And I think one of the things that happened to me as a result of all that is that I think it did for some people, many people, obscure the kind of writer that I actually am.”

— Salman Rushdie

430. “In television, the 60-minute series, ‘The Wire’ and ‘Mad Men’ and so on, the writer is the primary creative artist.”

— Salman Rushdie

431. “He wanted, for example, to investigate why one should hold fast to a religion not because it was true but because it was the faith of one’s fathers. Was faith not faith but simple family habit? Maybe there was no true religion but only this eternal handing down. And error could be handed down as easily as virtue. Was faith no more than an error of our ancestors?”

— Salman Rushdie

432. “It seems that the right of freedom of speech that was enshrined in numerous constitutions is now under attack by religious institutions.”

— Salman Rushdie

433. “Keep away from her,” said Ameer Merchant, but once the inexorable dynamic of the mythic has been set in motion, you might as well try and keep bees from honey, crooks from money, politicians from babies, philosophers from maybes. Vina had her hooks in me, and the consequence was the story of my life.”

— Salman Rushdie

434. “I grew up in a family in which there was very little religion. My father wasn’t religious at all. But he was really interested in the subject of, you know, the birth and growth of Islam. And he basically transmitted that interest to me.”

— Salman Rushdie

435. “Many of us didn’t believe in the image of bin Laden as a wandering Old Man of the Mountains, living on plants and insects in an inhospitable cave somewhere on the porous Pakistan-Afghan border.”

— Salman Rushdie

436. “Nothing but trouble outside my head; nothing but miracles inside it.”

— Salman Rushdie

437. “I dislike arranged marriages. There are some mistakes for which one should not be able to blame one’s poor parents.”

— Salman Rushdie

438. “I think if we wish to live in any kind of a moral universe, we must hold the perpetrators of violence responsible for the violence they perpetrate. It’s very simple. The criminal is responsible for the crime.”

— Salman Rushdie

439. “Fundamentalists of all faiths are the fundamental evil of our time.”

— Salman Rushdie

440. “The West sees Iran as an important force in the gulf.”

— Salman Rushdie

441. “The novel does not seek to establish a privileged language but it insists upon the freedom to portray and analyze the struggle between the different contestants for such privileges.”

— Salman Rushdie

442. “There is a widespread difficulty in the Muslim world, which has to do with how the people are taught about examining their own history. A whole range of stuff has been placed off limits.”

— Salman Rushdie

443. “Everybody loves ‘The Wire,’ and I think it’s okay, but in the end it’s just a police series.”

— Salman Rushdie

444. “At the beginning of their work together Arthur Hibbert gave him a piece of advice he never forgot. “You must never write history,” Hibbert said, “until you can hear the people speak.” He thought about that for years, and in the end it came to feel like a valuable guiding principle for fiction as well. If you didn’t have a sense of how people spoke, you didn’t know them well enough, and so you couldn’t – you shouldn’t – tell their story.”

— Salman Rushdie

445. “I do think there was a period there when my sanity was under intense pressure, and I didn’t know what to say or do or how to act. I was literally living from day to day.”

— Salman Rushdie

446. “Every quest takes places in both the sphere of the actual, which is what maps reveal to us, and in the sphere of the symbolic, for which the only maps are the unseen ones in our heads.”

— Salman Rushdie

447. “Life’s bruises demythologise us all. The earth gapes.”

— Salman Rushdie

448. “Certainly, the Hollywood cinema, there’s almost nothing of interest coming out of there.”

— Salman Rushdie

449. “It’s true that the human body is more vulnerable than the products of the human mind.”

— Salman Rushdie

450. “When you are making an independent film, money is never an issue.”

— Salman Rushdie