Salman Rushdie famous quotes

Religion, a mediaeval form of unreason, when combined with modern weaponry becomes a real threat to our freedoms. This religious totalitarianism has caused a deadly mutation in the heart of Islam and we see the tragic consequences in Paris today. I stand with Charlie Hebdo, as we all must, to defend the art of satire, which has always been a force for liberty and against tyranny, dishonesty and stupidity. 'Respect for religion' has become a code phrase meaning 'fear of religion.' Religions, like all other ideas, deserve criticism, satire, and, yes, our fearless disrespect.
-- Salman Rushdie

#Religious #Art #Real

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

#Book #Reading #Thinking

Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true.
-- Salman Rushdie

#Language #Speak #Ability

When you're writing for the screen you're really thinking all the time of what you have to do to make sure that they have the information that they need, that the emotional thread is not snapped, that the story moves at the right speed, to keep the audience hopefully sitting on the edge of their seats or else weeping or laughing.
-- Salman Rushdie

#Moving #Writing #Emotional

What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.
-- Salman Rushdie

#Honesty #Integrity #Expression

When you're writing for the screen, you have to be hyper-conscious every moment of how the audience is going to react. If you write just one scene where the audience is confused or it breaks their concentration in some way, then you've lost them, and you might never get them back.
-- Salman Rushdie

#Confused #Writing #Might

I stand with Charlie Hebdo, as we all must, to defend the art of satire
-- Salman Rushdie

#Art #Satire #Charlie

What I found interesting writing a screenplay as opposed to writing a novel is not the obvious thing, which is having to pare everything down and find the kind of essence, the skeleton if you like, which can then be fleshed out by performance and cinematography.
-- Salman Rushdie

#Writing #Essence #Skeletons

Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.
-- Salman Rushdie

#Games #Balls #Speech

I have no problem with people's religious beliefs. I just don't happen to have any.
-- Salman Rushdie

#Religious #People #Belief

We were language's magpies by nature, stealing whatever sounded bright and shiny.
-- Salman Rushdie

#Language #Stealing #Magpies

It's always been colossally important to me that my books should be well received in India. It's where I come from.
-- Salman Rushdie

#Book #Important #India

I stand with Charlie Hebdo, as we all must, to defend the art of satire, which has always been a force for liberty and against tyranny, dishonesty and stupidity.
-- Salman Rushdie

#Art #Stupidity #Liberty

I think it's a very important function of art to challenge accepted reality, especially when that reality is created by powerful interest groups.
-- Salman Rushdie

#Art #Powerful #Reality

An attack upon our ability to tell stories is not just censorship - it is a crime against our nature as human beings.
-- Salman Rushdie

#Stories #Censorship #Crime

One of the strange things about violent and authoritarian regimes is they don't like the glare of negative publicity. If you can make them sufficiently uncomfortable, they frequently respond by doing what you need them to do in the spirit of setting people free or ceasing arrests.
-- Salman Rushdie

#People #Negative #Needs

In India, as elsewhere in our darkening world, religion is the poison in the blood. Where religion intervenes, mere innocence is no excuse. Yet we go on skating around this issue, speaking of religion in the fashionable language of 'respect.' What is there to respect in any of this, or in any of the crimes now being committed almost daily around the world in religion's dreaded name?
-- Salman Rushdie

#Blood #Names #Issues

What I've always seen in writers and artists is the courage it takes to make an original work of art. I think the real risks in literature are linguistic and intellectual, and I hope we can highlight those, as well as political courage.
-- Salman Rushdie

#Art #Real #Thinking

The moment you declare a set of ideas to be immune from criticism, satire, derision, or contempt, freedom of thought becomes impossible.
-- Salman Rushdie

#Ideas #Criticism #Impossible

You can adhere to your faith, but that faith needs to march in line with the rest of the world and needs to find a way of expressing itself in the modern world.
-- Salman Rushdie

#World #Lines #Way

It matters, it always matters, to name rubbish as rubbish ... to do otherwise is to legitimize it.
-- Salman Rushdie

#Names #Rubbish #Matter

I think the business of writing a great deal of it is the business of paying attention to your characters, to the world they live in, to the story you have to tell, but just a kind of deep attention and out of that if you pay attention properly the story will tell you what it needs.
-- Salman Rushdie

#Character #Writing #Thinking

Cruelty is not a literary value.
-- Salman Rushdie

#Cruelty #Values

Discovery is fun. I am incredibly open to everything.
-- Salman Rushdie

#Fun #Discovery

What kind of idea are you? Are you the kind that compromises, does deals, accomodates itself to society, aims to find a niche, to survive; or are you the cussed, bloody-minded, ramrod-backed type of damnfool notion that would rather break than sway with the breeze? – The kind that will almost certainly, ninety-nine times out of hundred, be smashed to bits; but, the hundredth time, will change the world.
-- Salman Rushdie

#Life #Ideas #World

Between the adored and the adorer falls the shadow.
-- Salman Rushdie

#Fall #Shadow

I've always thought that one of the things that the Internet and the gaming world permits as a narrative technique is to not tell the story from beginning to end - to tell stories sideways, to give alternative possibilities that the reader can, in a way, choose between.
-- Salman Rushdie

#Giving #Alternatives #Stories

Five mysteries hold the keys to the unseen: the act of love, and the birth of a baby, and the contemplation of great art, and being in the presence of death or disaster, and hearing the human voice lifted in song.
-- Salman Rushdie

#Song #Baby #Art

When people use the term magic realism, usually they only mean 'magic' and they don't hear 'realism', whereas the way in which magic realism actually works is for the magic to be rooted in the real. It's both things. It's not just a fairytale moment. It's the surrealism that arises out of the real.
-- Salman Rushdie

#Real #Mean #People

The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas - uncertainty, progress, change - into crimes.
-- Salman Rushdie

#Atheist #Ideas #Religion

I think people direct good films when they feel personal to them, not because it's a famous book or something. It has to something move over that and somehow become personal to the director.
-- Salman Rushdie

#Moving #Book #Thinking

A photograph is a moral decision taken in one eighth of a second.
-- Salman Rushdie

#Photography #Taken #Decision

When you write you in a way write out of what you think of as your best self, the part of you that is lacking in foibles and weaknesses and egotism and vanities and so on. You're just trying to really say something as truthful as you can out of the best that you have in you.
-- Salman Rushdie

#Writing #Thinking #Vanity

When a reader falls in love with a book, it leaves its essence inside him, like radioactive fallout in an arable field, and after that there are certain crops that will no longer grow in him, while other, stranger, more fantastic growths may occasionally be produced.
-- Salman Rushdie

#Falling In Love #Book #Essence

Games sometimes require lateral thinking. They sometimes require quite skilled hand-eye coordination and so on. But they're not in any sense intelligent in the way that you want your children to develop intelligence to make the mind not just supple, but actually informed.
-- Salman Rushdie

#Children #Eye #Intelligent

How do you defeat terrorism? Don’t be terrorized.
-- Salman Rushdie

#Defeat #Terrorism #Civil Society

Memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else's version more than his own.
-- Salman Rushdie

#Memories #Reality #Special

Our lives disconnect and reconnect, we move on, and later we may again touch one another, again bounce away. This is the felt shape of a human life, neither simply linear nor wholly disjunctive nor endlessly bifurcating, but rather this bouncey-castle sequence of bumpings-into and tumblings-apart.
-- Salman Rushdie

#Moving #Shapes #May

My heart broke open and history fell in.
-- Salman Rushdie

#Heart #My Heart #Broke

What had been (at the beginning) no bigger than a full stop had expanded into a comma, a word, a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter; now it was bursting into more complex developments, becoming, one might say, a book - perhaps an encylopaedia - even a whole language...
-- Salman Rushdie

#Book #Development #Might

Reality is a question of perspective;
-- Salman Rushdie

#Reality #Perspective

Until you know who you are you can’t write.
-- Salman Rushdie

#Writing #Who You Are

A novel, I think, is partly about the contemporary and partly about the eternal, and it's the balance of that that's difficult to achieve.
-- Salman Rushdie

#Thinking #Balance #Achieve

faith without doubt is addiction
-- Salman Rushdie

#Addiction #Doubt

If Woody Allen were a Muslim, he'd be dead by now.
-- Salman Rushdie

#Atheism #Woody #Positive Atheism

When you write, you write out of your best self. Everything else drops away.
-- Salman Rushdie

#Writing #Self

One of the problems with defending free speech is you often have to defend people that you find to be outrageous and unpleasant and disgusting.
-- Salman Rushdie

#People #Speech #Problem

A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return.
-- Salman Rushdie

#Book #Writing #Beer

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

#Dust #Names #Sound

The acceptance that all that is solid has melted into the air, that reality and morality are not givens but imperfect human constructs, is the point from which fiction begins.
-- Salman Rushdie

#Acceptance #Reality #Air

Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.
-- Salman Rushdie

#Book #Writing #Creation

It is very, very easy not to be offended by a book. You just have to shut it.
-- Salman Rushdie

#Book #Easy #Offended

What kind of Christmas present would Jesus ask Santa for?
-- Salman Rushdie

#Christmas #Jesus #Santa

perhaps, if one wishes to remain an individual in the midst of the teeming multitudes, one must make oneself grotesque.
-- Salman Rushdie

#Wish #Conformity #Individualism

Go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets. Take a deep breath before you begin...
-- Salman Rushdie

#Safety #Effort #Trying

Rock and roll music - the music of freedom frightens people and unleashes all manner of conservative defense mechanisms.
-- Salman Rushdie

#Rocks #Rock And Roll #People

Religion, a mediaeval form of unreason, when combined with modern weaponry becomes a real threat to our freedoms.
-- Salman Rushdie

#Real #Modern #Weaponry

Good advice is rarer than rubies.
-- Salman Rushdie

#Advice #Rubies #Good Advice

Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems - but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible.
-- Salman Rushdie

#Time #Past #Reality

In this world without quiet corners, there can be no easy escapes from history, from hullabaloo, from terrible, unquiet fuss.
-- Salman Rushdie

#History #World #Quiet

A sigh isn't just a sigh. We inhale the world and breathe out meaning. While we can. While we can.
-- Salman Rushdie

#World #Breathe #Sigh

It seems that the right of freedom of speech that was enshrined in numerous constitutions is now under attack by religious institutions.
-- Salman Rushdie

#Religious #Freedom Of Speech #Constitution

We all owe death a life.
-- Salman Rushdie

Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination and of the heart.
-- Salman Rushdie

#Heart #Imagination #Literature

Exile is a dream of a glorious return. Exile is a vision of revolution: Elba, not St Helena. It is an endless paradox: looking forward by always looking back. The exile is a ball hurled high into the air.
-- Salman Rushdie

#Dream #Air #Vision

Our human tragedy is that we are unable to comprehend our experience, it slips through our fingers, we can't hold on to it, and the more time passes, the harder it gets...My father said that the natural world gave us explanations to compensate for the meanings we could not grasp. The slant of the cold sunlight on a winter pine, the music of water, an oar cutting the lake and the flight of birds, the mountains' nobility , the silence of the silence. We are given life but must accept that it is unattainable and rejoice in what can be held in the eye, the memory, the mind.
-- Salman Rushdie

#Memories #Father #Eye

When you throw everything up in the air anything becomes possible.
-- Salman Rushdie

#Air

Our lives, our stories, flowed into one another's, were no longer our own, individual, discrete.
-- Salman Rushdie

#Stories #Individual

Not all possibilities are open to us. The world is finite; our hopes spill over its rim.
-- Salman Rushdie

#World #Possibility #Finite

Freedom to reject is the only freedom.
-- Salman Rushdie

#Rejects

If the creative artist worries if he will still be free tomorrow, then he will not be free today.
-- Salman Rushdie

#Artist #Worry #Creative

The lessons one learns at school are not always the ones the school thinks it's teaching.
-- Salman Rushdie

#Teaching #School #Thinking

Literature is the one place in any society where, within the secrecy of our own heads, we can hear voices talking about everything in every possible way.
-- Salman Rushdie

#Voice #Talking #Literature

Stories in families are colossally important. Every family has stories: some funny, some proud, some embarrassing, some shameful. Knowing them is proof of belonging to the family.
-- Salman Rushdie

#Knowing #Important #Stories

There is nothing intrinsic linking any religion with any act of violence. The crusades don't prove that Christianity was violent. The Inquisition doesn't prove that Christianity tortures people. But that Christianity did torture people.
-- Salman Rushdie

#People #Violence #Christianity

Free societies...are societies in motion, and with motion comes tension, dissent, friction. Free people strike sparks, and those sparks are the best evidence of freedom's existence.
-- Salman Rushdie

#People #Atheism #Society

Now I know what a ghost is. Unfinished business, that's what.
-- Salman Rushdie

#Ghost #Unfinished

Having been borne across the world, we are translated men. It is normally supposed that something always gets lost in translation; I cling, obstinately, to the notion that something can also be gained.
-- Salman Rushdie

#Men #World #Lost

Whenever someone who knows you disappears, you lose one version of yourself. Yourself as you were seen, as you were judged to be. Lover or enemy, mother or friend, those who know us construct us, and their several knowings slant the different facets of our characters like diamond-cutter's tools. Each such loss is a step leading to the grave, where all versions blend and end.
-- Salman Rushdie

#Mother #Character #Loss

Who what am I? My answer: I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I’ve gone which would not have happened if I had not come. Nor am I particularly exceptional in this matter; each ‘I’, every one of the now-six-hundred-million-plus of us, contains a similar multitude. I repeat for the last time: to understand me, you’ll have to swallow the world.
-- Salman Rushdie

#Gone #Answers #World

From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable.
-- Salman Rushdie

#Men #Used #Justify

Censorship is the thing that stops you doing what you want to do, and what writers want to talk about is what they do, not what stops them doing it.
-- Salman Rushdie

#Doing What You Want #Want #Censorship

But love is what we want, not freedom. Who then is the unluckier man? The beloved, who is given his heart's desire and must for ever after fear its loss, or the free man, with his unlooked-for liberty, naked and alone between the captive armies of the earth?
-- Salman Rushdie

#Heart #Loss #Army

Respect for religion' has become a code phrase meaning 'fear of religion'. Religions, like all other ideas, deserve criticism, satire, and, yes, our fearless disrespect.
-- Salman Rushdie

#Inspirational #Life #Ideas

Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, power to retell it, to rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change, truly are powerless, because they cannot think new thoughts.
-- Salman Rushdie

#Thinking #Stories #New Thought

Laila Lalami has fashioned an absorbing story of one of the first encounters between Spanish conquistadores and Native Americans, a frightening, brutal, and much-falsified history that here, in her brilliantly imagined fiction, is rewritten to give us something that feels very like the truth.
-- Salman Rushdie

#Native American #Giving #Fiction

What's the use of stories that aren't even true?
-- Salman Rushdie

#Stories #Use

Masks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull.
-- Salman Rushdie

#Honesty #Skulls #Mask

I used to say, 'There is a God-shaped hole in me.' For a long time I stressed the absence, the hole. Now I find it is the shape which has become more important.
-- Salman Rushdie

#God #Long #Important

The publishing of a book is a worldwide event. The attempt to suppress a book is a worldwide event.
-- Salman Rushdie

#Book #Events #Publishing

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

#Heart #Earthquakes #Return

Everest silences you...when you come down, nothing seems worth saying, nothing at all. You find the nothingness wrapping you up, like a sound. Non-being. You can't keep it up, of course. the world rushes in soon enough. What shuts you up is, I think, the sight you've had of perfection: why speak if you can't manage perfect thoughts, perfect sentences? It feels like a betrayal of what you've been through. But it fades; you accept that certain compromises, closures, are required if you're to continue.
-- Salman Rushdie

#Betrayal #Thinking #Sight

Make as much racket as you like people. Noise is life and an excess of noise is a sign that life is good. There will be time for us all to be quiet when we are safely dead.
-- Salman Rushdie

#Life Is Good #People #Excess

To understand just one life you have to swallow the world ... do you wonder, then, that I was a heavy child?
-- Salman Rushdie

#Life #Children #World

A book is not completed till it's read.
-- Salman Rushdie

#Book

You can't judge an internal injury by the size of the hole.
-- Salman Rushdie

#Judging #Size #Injury

Something was badly amiss with the spiritual life of the planet...Too many demons inside people claiming to believe in God.
-- Salman Rushdie

#Spiritual #Believe #People

Fundamentalism isn't about religion, it's about power.
-- Salman Rushdie

#Atheist #Religion

Music, love, death. Certainly a triangle of sorts; maybe even an eternal one. "The only people who can see the whole picture," he murmured, "are the ones who step out of the frame." (The ground beneath her feet.)
-- Salman Rushdie

#Feet #People #Triangles

We crave permission openly to become our secret selves.
-- Salman Rushdie

#Self #Secret #Permission