Salman Rushdie Quotes (87 Quotes)

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

What can't be cured must be endured.

After a winter's gestation in its eggshell of ice, the valley had beaked its way out into the open, moist and yellow.

What you were is forever who you are.

And my grandfather... was forever knocked into that middle place, unable to worship a God in whose existence he could not wholly disbelieve. Permanent alteration: a hole.

What's real and what's true aren't necessarily the same.

Everything has shape, if you look for it. There is no escape from form.

Why, alone of all the more-than-five-hundred-million, should I have to bear the burden of history?

Family history, of course, has its proper dietary laws. One is supposed to swallow and digest only the permitted parts of it, the halal portions of the past, drained of their redness, their blood. Unfortunately, this makes the stories less juicy...

A figure of speech is a shifty thing; it can be twisted or it can be straight.

I admit it: above all things, I fear absurdity.

A little bit of one story joins onto an idea from another, and hey presto, . . . not old tales but new ones. Nothing comes from nothing.

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.

Believe in your own eyes and you'll get into a lot of trouble, hot water, a mess.

I fell victim to the temptation of every autobiographer, to the illusion that since the past exists only in one's memories and the words which strive vainly to encapsulate them, it is possible to create past events simply by saying they occurred.

He knew what he knew: that the real world was full of magic, so magical worls could easily be real.

I have been a swallower of lives; and to know me, just the one of me, you'll have to swallow the lot as well.

If you want pay, then just be gay.

I have been so-many too-many persons; life, unlike syntax, allows one more than three.

It is all for love. Which is a wonderful and dashing matter. But which can also be a very foolish thing.

India, the new myth--a collective fiction in which anything was possible, a fable rivalled only by the two other mighty fantasies: money and God.

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.

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.

Straight answers were beyond the powers of Rashid Khalifa, who would never take a short cut if there was a longer, twistier road available.

Most of what matters in our lives takes place in our absence.

The black ice of that dark fortress received the sunlight like a mortal wound.

Religion was the glue of Pakistan, holding the halves together; just as consciousness, the awareness of oneself as a homogenous entity in time, a blend of past and present, is the glue of personality, holding together our then and our now.

They are the Eggheads. He is the Walrus.

The process of revision should be constant and endless

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.

There is nothing like a War for the reinvention of lives...

If you want to tell the untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you've got to find a language. Which goes for film as well as prose, for documentary as well as autobiography. Use the wrong language, and you're dumb and blind.

If I were asked for a one-sentence sound bite on religion, I would say I was against it.

The real risks for any artist are taken. . . in pushing the work to the limits of what is possible, in the attempt to increase the sum of what it is possible to think. Books become good when they go to this edge and risk falling over it. . .

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.

Meanwhile, it seems, the world is suffering from compassion fatigue,

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.

We must conclude that it is not only a particular political ideology that has failed, but the idea that men and women could ever define themselves in terms that exclude their spiritual needs.

Life is fury, he'd thought. Fury sexual, Oedipal, political, magical, brutal drives us to our finest heights and coarsest depths. Out of furia comes creation, inspiration, originality, passion, but also violence, pain, pure unafraid destruction, the giving and receiving of blows from which we never recover. The Furies pursue us Shiva dances his furious dance to create and also to destroy. But never mind about gods Sara ranting at him represented the human spirit in its purest, least socialized form. This is what we are, what we civilize ourselves to disguise the terrifying human animal in us, the exalted, transcendent, self-destructive, untramelled lord of creation.

I've been gradually reclaiming all kinds of freedoms over these years..,

I do not need the idea of God to explain the world I live in.

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

The novel does not seek to establish a privileged language but it insists upon the freedom to portray and analyse the struggle between the different contestants for such privileges.

Doubt, it seems to me, is the central condition of a human being in the twentieth century.

I make no complaint. I am a writer. I do not accept my condition I will strive to change it but I inhabit it, I am trying to learn from it.

The only privilege literature deserves -- and this privilege it requires in order to exist -- is the privilege of being in the arena of discourse, the place where the struggle of our languages can be acted out.

I have a deep feeling for Kashmir, and I just had to write this book, ... But it's very hard to write about real events. It becomes unbearable. The challenge in writing this book was how do you write about these things bearably without sweetening the pill

Susan Sontag was a great literary artist,a fearless and original thinker, ever valiant for truth, and an indefatigable ally in many struggles.

A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.

He told her he fell from the sky and lived. She took a deep breath and believed him, because of her father's faith in the myriad and contradictory possibilities of life, and because, too, of what the mountain had taught her. Okay, she said, exhaling. I'll buy it. Just don't tell my mother, all right The universe was a place of wonders, and only habituation, the anaesthesia of the everyday, dulled our sight. She had read, a couple of days back, that as part of their natural processes of combustion, the stars in the skies crushed carbon into diamonds. The idea of the stars raining diamonds into the void that sounded like a miracle, too. If that could happen, so could this. Babies fell out of zillionth-floor windows and bounced. There was a scene about that in Franois Truffaut's movie L'Argent du Poche...She focused her thoughts. Sometimes, she decided to say, wonderful things happen to me, too.