Top 500 Salman Rushdie Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “England in a way is lucky. It’s an island, so the frontiers are given by the sea.”

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

403. “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

404. “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

405. “Raif Badawi’s is an important voice for all of us to hear.”

— Salman Rushdie

406. “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

407. “How treacherous history is! Half-truths, ignorance, deceptions, false trails, errors and lies, and buried somewhere in between all of that, the truth, in which it is easy to lose faith, of which it is consequently easy to say, it’s a chimera, there’s no such thing, everything is relative, one man’s absolute belief is another man’s fairy tale; but about which we insist, we insist most emphatically, that it is too important an idea to give up to the relativity merchants.”

— Salman Rushdie

408. “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

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

— Salman Rushdie

410. “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

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

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

414. “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

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

— Salman Rushdie

416. “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

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

— Salman Rushdie

418. “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

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

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

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423. “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

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

— Salman Rushdie

425. “India is my kid sister.”

— Salman Rushdie

426. “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

427. “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

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

— Salman Rushdie

429. “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

430. “A little thinking is a dangerous thing.”

— Salman Rushdie

431. “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

432. “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

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

— Salman Rushdie

434. “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

435. “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

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

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

440. “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

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

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

444. “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

445. “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

446. “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

447. “And my chutneys and kasaundies are, after all, connected to my nocturnal scribblings –– by day amongst the pickle-vats, by night within these sheets, I spend my time at the great work of preserving. Memory, as well as fruit, is being saved from the corruption of the clocks.”

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

449. “Sometimes writing a novel is not unlike having a baby. You’d have to ask a female novelist to compare the pain.”

— Salman Rushdie

450. “I always thought the front line was the bookstores. And bookstores around America, around the world did astonishingly well. They held the line. They didn’t chicken out. You know, they defended the book. They kept it in the front of the store.”

— Salman Rushdie

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