Top 500 Salman Rushdie Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “I’ve never rejected the world I came from. To be rejected by it is horrible.”

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

405. “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

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

— Salman Rushdie

407. “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

408. “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

409. “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

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

— Salman Rushdie

411. “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

412. “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

413. “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

414. “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

415. “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

416. “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

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

— Salman Rushdie

418. “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

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 “The problem of telling contemporary history is that your message gets outdated.”

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

424. “India is my kid sister.”

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

430. “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

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

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

433. “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

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

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

436. “I for one don’t need a supreme “sacred” arbiter in order to be a moral being.”

— Salman Rushdie

437. “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

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

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

— Salman Rushdie

443. “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

444. “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

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

— Salman Rushdie

446. “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

447. “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

448. “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

449. “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

450. “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