Languages of Truth Quotes

“Perhaps we, who are language animals, possess a song and story instinct; we need and move toward stories and songs not because we are taught to do so but because it is in our nature to need them.”
― Salman Rushdie, Languages of Truth: Essays 2003-2020

“the act of falling in love with a book or story changes us in some way, and the beloved tale becomes a part of our picture of the world, a part of the way in which we understand things and make judgments and choices in our daily lives.”
― Salman Rushdie, Languages of Truth: Essays 2003-2020

“The only people who see the whole picture are the ones who step out of the frame.”
― Salman Rushdie, Languages of Truth: Essays 2003-2020

“Crisis shines a very bright light on human behavior, leaves no shadows in which we can hide, and reveals, simultaneously, the worst of which we are capable and our better natures”
― Salman Rushdie, Languages of Truth: Essays 2003-2020

“when we read a book we like, or even love, we find ourselves in agreement with its portrait of human life. Yes, we say, this is how we are, this is what we do to one another, this is true. That, perhaps, is where literature can help most. We can make people agree, in this time of radical disagreement, on the truths of the great constant, which is human nature.”
― Salman Rushdie, Languages of Truth: Essays 2003-2020

“…Shakespeare is both my door knocker and the owner of the domains to which the knock admits me, at once my Virgil opening the gates of hell and heaven, and the devil, and God, and I say this as a person who believes in neither God nor the devil, I believe only in Virgil…”
― Salman Rushdie, Languages of Truth: Essays 2003-2020

“When we confront a work of art we listen for the artist's voice. The greater the artist, the stronger and more distinct is the voice we hear.
Only Mozart sounds like Mozart, only Hemingway sounds like Hemingway. This is one of the chief satisfactions of the artistic experience: to hear a voice speaking as only that voice can speak. And when the voice is exceptionally strong, it can exalt its material and allow us to experience the rarest of joys: that of transcendence.”
― Salman Rushdie, Languages of Truth: Essays 2003-2020

“I decided long ago that I didn't need the advice of Catholic priests or Wahhabi mullahs on that subject. The child-abuse scandals in the Catholic church, and the authoritarian and even murderous crimes carried out by Wahhabi Islam's most powerful patrons, the Saudi ruling family, would convince me that the ideologies which they adhere to are not the best resources from which to develop and ethical world view.”
― Salman Rushdie, Languages of Truth: Essays 2003-2020

“In America, if you dismiss religion from a lecture podium, you often hear noises of shock: gasps, sharp intakes of breath. In America, you can't be elected dogcatcher if you can't prove that you go to church every Sunday and have a close relationship with the priest there.”
― Salman Rushdie, Languages of Truth: Essays 2003-2020

“Christopher came to believe that the people who understood the dangers posed by radical Islam were on the right, that his erstwhile comrades on the left were arranging with one another to miss what seemed to him like a pretty obvious point; and so, never one to do things by halves, he made what looked to many people like a U-turn”
― Salman Rushdie, Languages of Truth: Essays 2003-2020

“Hitchens saw that the attack on the Satanic Verses was not an isolated occurrence, that across the Muslim world, writers and journalists and artists were being accused of the same crimes: blasphemy, heresy, apostasy, and their modern-day associates, 'insult' and 'offence'. And he intuited that beyond this intellectual assault lay the possibility of an attack on a broader front. He quoted Heine to me: 'Where they burn books, they will afterwards burn people.' hitchens referred to me as an 'uppity wog' before.”
― Salman Rushdie, Languages of Truth: Essays 2003-2020

“Originality is dangerous. It challenges, questions, overturns assumptions, unsettles moral codes, disrespects sacred cows or other such entities. It can be shocking, or ugly, or, to use the catch-all term so beloved of the tabloid press, controversial. And if we believe in liberty, if we want the air we breathe to remain plentiful and breathable, this is the art whose right to exist we must not only defend but celebrate. Art is not entertainment. At its very best, it's a revolution”
― Salman Rushdie, Languages of Truth: Essays 2003-2020

“When I was writing my novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet, I became enthralled by the myth of Orpheus, the greatest poet who was also the greatest singer, the personage in whom song and story became one. You can recount the myth of Orpheus in a hundred words or less: his love for the nymph Eurydice, her pursuit by the beekeeper Aristaeus, the snakebite that killed her, her descent into hell, his pursuit of her beyond the doors of death, his attempt to rescue her, his being granted by the lord of the underworld -- as a reward for the genius of his singing -- the possibility of leading her back to life as long as he didn't look back, and his fatal backward look. And yet when you begin to delve into the story it seems almost inexhaustibly rich, for at its heart is a great triangular tension between the grandest matters of life: love, art and death. You can turn and turn the story and the triangle tells you different things. It tells you that art, inspired by love, can have a greater power than death. It tells you, contrariwise, that death, in spite of art, can defeat the power of love. And it tells you that art alone can make possible the transaction between love and death that is at the centre of all human life.”
― Salman Rushdie, Languages of Truth: Essays 2003-2020

“inhuman. The traditions I like are the ones in which the gods behave badly. The Greek and Roman deities are particularly good at seriously bad behavior. They are vain, thin-skinned, vengeful, partisan, lustful, drunken, jealous, bullying, cruel. Who could fail to be charmed by such a bunch, by Zeus the serial rapist, or vindictive Athena, or Dionysus the capricious drunk? What an improvement on the moral exemplars of the great monotheisms, those stern, unyielding policemen of the soul! The gods of Greece and Rome, very sensibly, are uninterested in the puritanical business of setting us an example. They do not say to us, “Do as we do,” or “Think as we think.” They leave us free to act and think, just as they insist on being themselves. All”
― Salman Rushdie, Languages of Truth: Essays 2003-2020

“This is what I’m wrestling with, this great shapeless mutating blob that can’t even agree with itself about what it actually is, this is what I’m trying to give shape to, and speaking for myself, speaking now not so much as a writer but as a reader, I’d rather put my trust in the writers who acknowledge the battle, who make you see that any shape they impose on the blob is only provisional, that their own picture of the world gets in the way, that it’s hard to step outside the frame. Better to trust them, on the whole, than the ones who pretend that the world is as solid as a rock, even though rocks crumble, or as safe as houses, even though houses totter and explode.”
― Salman Rushdie, Languages of Truth: Essays 2003-2020

“Here’s this world we have, not flat, not anymore, we know that, but can we agree what it actually is? Round, okay, it’s roundish, but beyond that? More and more it’s a place where people argue, where they don’t agree, where one man’s liberation is another man’s imperialism, where battle lines are drawn in the sand, across glaciers, through the hearts of broken cities, where a great dispute is in progress about the nature of reality, about what is the case; there are worlds in collision, incompatible realities fighting for the same space, and the result, often, is violence.”
― Salman Rushdie, Languages of Truth: Essays 2003-2020

“description of the world contains facts, certainly, and facts, as we’ve seen, are fluttery, elusive creatures, but there are armies of fact lepidopterists chasing after them, and sometimes they do get nailed to the wall, like moths.”
― Salman Rushdie, Languages of Truth: Essays 2003-2020

“Verhalen zijn niet waar, maar doordat ze onwaar zijn kunnen ze waarheden voelbaar en kenbaar maken die de waarheid niet kan vertellen.”
― Salman Rushdie, Taal van de waarheid

“when he took his stand on the draft, refusing to go to ’Nam, sacrificing his title, risking jail, putting it all on the line for a principle, he became, well, awesome. In those days the word still meant what it was supposed to mean, “inspiring great admiration/awe,” and Ali did that.”
― Salman Rushdie, Languages of Truth: Essays 2003-2020

“we live in an age in which we are urged to define ourselves more and more narrowly, to crush our own multidimensionality into the straitjacket of a one-dimensional national, ethnic, tribal, or religious identity. This, I have come to think, may be the evil from which flow all the other evils of our time.”
― Salman Rushdie, Languages of Truth: Essays 2003-2020

“a plausible argument can be made that many cinematic adaptations are better than their prose source materials. At the risk of offending the enormous army of Tolkien fans, I would suggest that Peter Jackson’s films surpass Tolkien’s originals, because, to be blunt, Jackson makes films better than Tolkien writes; Jackson’s film language, sweeping, lyrical, by turns intimate and epic, is greatly preferable to Tolkien’s prose, which veers alarmingly between windbaggery, archness, pomposity, and an unbearable thee- and thou-ing faux-classicism, achieving something like humanity and ordinary English only in the parts about hobbits, the little people who are our representatives in the saga to a far greater degree than its grandly heroic (or snivelingly crooked) men.”
― Salman Rushdie, Languages of Truth: Essays 2003-2020

“The question of essences remains at the heart of the adaptive act; how to make a second version of a first thing, of a book or film or poem or vegetable, or of yourself, that is successfully its own new thing and yet carries with it the essence, the spirit, the soul of the first thing, the thing that you yourself, or your book or poem or film or your mango or lime, originally were.”
― Salman Rushdie, Languages of Truth: Essays 2003-2020

“Stupidity is better kept a secret than displayed.”
― Salman Rushdie, Languages of Truth: Essays 2003-2020

“if the intention of the artist, the writer, is to make as true and honest a response to the world as he can, if it be his intention to use the best powers of language and imagination to create a vision arising out of his sense of what it is to be alive in the world, and if he be faithful to that intention, then what he makes will be a work of realism, whether it be filled with dragons and broomsticks or with kitchen sinks and offices. Van Gogh’s painting of a starry night doesn’t look like a photograph of a starry night or, indeed, what a starry night looks like to the naked eye, but it is a great painting of a starry night all the same, and all who look upon it understand it to be true.”
― Salman Rushdie, Languages of Truth: Essays 2003-2020

“I also hoped that my own track record, the things I’d written, the work I’d done, the person I had been, would be my best defense against the demonization of my character and motives that was taking place. But those were thoughts from before the time in which we all became too frightened of religion in general and one particular religion in particular—religion redefined as the capacity of religionists to commit earthly violence in the name of their unearthly sky god.”
― Salman Rushdie, Languages of Truth: Essays 2003-2020