Salman Rushdie > Quotes

“Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

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

“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, The Ground Beneath Her Feet

“I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I'm gone which would not have happened if I had not come.”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children

“A poet's work . . . to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep.”
― Salman Rushdie

“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

“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

“To understand just one life you have to swallow the world ... do you wonder, then, that I was a heavy child?”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children

“Go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets. Take a deep breath before you begin talking. Aim for the stars. Keep grinning. Be bloody-minded. Argue with the world. And never forget that writing is as close as we get to keeping a hold on the thousand and one things--childhood, certainties, cities, doubts, dreams, instants, phrases, parents, loves--that go on slipping , like sand, through our fingers.”
― Salman Rushdie

“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, The Ground Beneath Her Feet

“Now I know what a ghost is. Unfinished business, that's what.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

“faith without doubt is addiction”
― Salman Rushdie

“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, The Satanic Verses

“From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

“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, Midnight's Children

“We were language's magpies by nature, stealing whatever sounded bright and shiny.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet

“A photograph is a moral decision taken in one eighth of a second. ”
― Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet

“If you were an atheist, Birbal," the Emperor challenged his first minister, "what would you say to the true believers of all the great religions of the world?" Birbal was a devout Brahmin from Trivikrampur, but he answered unhesitatingly, "I would say to them that in my opinion they were all atheists as well; I merely believe in one god less than each of them." "How so?" the Emperor asked. "All true believers have good reasons for disbelieving in every god except their own," said Birbal. "And so it is they who, between them, give me all the reasons for believing in none."

-- From "The Shelter of the World”
― Salman Rushdie, The Enchantress Of Florence: A Novel

“Perhaps the story you finish is never the one you begin.”
― Salman Rushdie

“We are described into corners, and then we must describe ourselves out of corners.”
― Salman Rushdie

“So Oz finally became home; the imagined world became the actual world, as it does for us all, because the truth is that once we have left our childhood places and started out to make our own lives, armed only with what we have and are, we understand that the real secret of the ruby slippers is not that "there's no place like home," but rather that there is no longer such a place as home: except, of course, for the homes we make, or the homes that are made for us, in Oz, which is anywhere and everywhere, except the place from which we began.
In the place from which I began, after all, I watched the film from the child's - Dorothy's point of view. I experienced, with her, the frustration of being brushed aside by Uncle Henry and Auntie Em, busy with their dull grown-up counting. Like all adults, they couldn't focus on what was really important to Dorothy: namely, the threat to Toto. I ran away with Dorothy and then ran back. Even the shock of discovering that the Wizard was a humbug was a shock I felt as a child, a shock to the child's faith in adults. Perhaps, too, I felt something deeper, something I couldn't articulate; perhaps some half-formed suspicion about grown-ups was being confirmed.
Now, as I look at the movie again, I have become the fallible adult. Now I am a member of the tribe of imperfect parents who cannot listen to their children's voices. I, who no longer have a father, have become a father instead, and now it is my fate to be unable to satisfy the longings of a child. This is the last and most terrible lesson of the film: that there is one final, unexpected rite of passage. In the end, ceasing to be children, we all become magicians without magic, exposed conjurers, with only our simply humanity to get us through.
We are the humbugs now.”
― Salman Rushdie, Step Across This Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992-2002

“The only people who see the whole picture,' he murmured, 'are the ones who step out of the frame.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet

“Fundamentalism isn't about religion, it's about power.”
― Salman Rushdie

“A sigh isn't just a sigh. We inhale the world and breathe out meaning. While we can. While we can.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Moor's Last Sigh

“I want more than what I want. (Vina Apsara)”
― Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet

“The world, somebody wrote, is the place we prove real by dying in it.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

“Realism can break a writer's heart.”
― Salman Rushdie, Shame

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

“We crave permission openly to become our secret selves.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Moor's Last Sigh

“Vertigo is the conflict between the fear of falling and the desire to fall.”
― Salman Rushdie

“So India’s problem turns out to be the world’s problem. What happened in India has happened in God’s name.

The problem’s name is God.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

“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

“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, The Ground Beneath Her Feet

“Most of what matters in our lives takes place in our absence.”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children

“Question: What is the opposite of faith?

Not disbelief. Too final, certain, closed. Itself is a kind of belief.

Doubt.

The human condition, but what of the angelic? Halfway between Allahgod and homosap, did they ever doubt? They did: challenging God's will one day they hid muttering beneath the Throne, daring to ask forbidden things: antiquestions. Is it right that. Could it not be argued. Freedom, the old antiquest. He calmed them down, naturally, employing management skills a la god. Flattered them: you will be the instruments of my will on earth, the salvationdamnation of man, all the usual etcetera. And hey presto, the end of protest, on with the haloes, back to work. Angels are easily pacified; turn them into instruments and they'll play your harpy tune. Human beings are tougher nuts, can doubt anything, even the evidence of their own eyes. Of behing-their-own-eyes. Of what, as they sink heavy-lidded, transpires behind closed peepers ... angels, they don't have much in the way of a will. To will is to disagree; not to submit; to dissent.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

“Something was badly amiss with the spiritual life of the planet...Too many demons inside people claiming to believe in God.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

“Masks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

“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, Midnight's Children

“You can't judge an internal injury by the size of the hole.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

“Meaning is a shaky edifice we build out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old fillms, small victories, people hated, people loved; perhaps it is because our sense of what is the case is constructed from such inadequate materials that we defend it so fiercely, even to death.”
― Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991

“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, Midnight's Children

“We all owe death a life.”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children

“Not all possibilities are open to us. The world is finite; our hopes spill over its rim.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

“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

“Nothing comes from nothing, Thieflet; no story comes from nowhere; new stories are born from old--it is the new combinations that make them new.”
― Salman Rushdie, Haroun And The Sea Of Stories

“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, The Enchantress Of Florence: A Novel

“In spite of all evidence that life is discontinuous, a valley of rifts, and that random chance plays a great part in our fates, we go on believing in the continuity of things, in causation and meaning. But we live on a broken mirror, and fresh cracks appear in its surface every day. ”
― Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet

“What kind of Christmas present would Jesus ask Santa for?”
― Salman Rushdie, Fury

“Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can't forgive.”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children

“Only under extreme pressure can we change into that which it is in our most profound nature to become . . .

That is what people get wrong about transformation. We're not all shallow proteans, forever shifting shape. We're not science fiction. It's like when coal becomes diamond. It doesn't afterwards retain the possibility of change. Squeeze it as hard as you like, it won't turn into a rubber ball, or a Quattro Stagione pizza, or a self-portrait by Rembrandt. It's done.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet