Top 500 Salman Rushdie Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “My mother’s pregnancy, it seems, was fated; my birth, however, owed a good deal to accident.”

— Salman Rushdie

402. “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

403. “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

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

— Salman Rushdie

405. “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

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

— Salman Rushdie

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

— 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

Featured in: Book Quotes

409. “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

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. “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

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

— Salman Rushdie

413. “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

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

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

418. “Sometimes great, banned works defy the censor’s description and impose themselves on the world – ‘Ulysses,’ ‘Lolita,’ the ‘Arabian Nights.’”

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

Featured in: Fun Quotes

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

— Salman Rushdie

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

421. “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

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

422. “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

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

— Salman Rushdie

424. “India is my kid sister.”

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

426. “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

427. “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

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

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

430. “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

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

— Salman Rushdie

432. “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

433. “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

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

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

440. “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

441. “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

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

— Salman Rushdie

443. “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

444. “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

445. “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

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

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

448. “You don’t fight radical conservatism with not-quite-so radical conservatism.”

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

450. “The interesting thing about history sometimes. is that you know these people existed, and you knew what jobs they did, but you don’t know much about them as people, so you actually have to make them up.”

— Salman Rushdie