Top 188 Salman Rushdie Quotes

Nobody wants to read a 600 page book in which the author is fabulous throughout.

Someone asked me if I was afraid to write my memoirs. I told him: ‘We have to stop drawing up accounts of fear! We live in a society in which people are allowed to tell their story, and that is what I do.’

I accept there are people out there who don’t like me. I don’t like them.

If you live in free countries, you don’t have to spend all your life arguing about freedom because it is all around you. It seems redundant to make a lot of noise about something when, in fact, there it is. But if someone tries to remove it, it becomes important for you to formulate your own defenses of it.

If you have children, you worry about the world you’re leaving them.

Killing people because you don’t like their ideas – it’s a bad thing.

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.

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

In the ’50s, listening to Elvis and others on the radio in Bombay – it didn’t feel alien. Noises made by a truck driver from Tupelo, Mississippi, seemed relevant to a middle-class kid growing up on the other side of the world. That has always fascinated me.

When ‘Midnight‘s Children’ came out, people in the West tended to respond to the fantasy elements in the novel, to praise it in those terms. In India, people read it like a history book.

In Iran, fundamentalism was fuelled to an extent by the regime of the Shah being supported by the West.

I have always thought, the secret purpose of the book tour is to make the writer hate the book he’s written. And, as a result, drive him to write another book.

Our lives teach us who we are.

One of the strange things about violent and authoritarian regimes is they don’t like the glare of negative publicity.

I think that England made a very big, historical mistake to allow itself to become the kind of terrorist capital of the world.

One of the things I’ve thought about ‘Midnight’s Children’ is that it is a novel which puts a Muslim family at the centre of the Indian experience.

I never thought of myself as a writer about religion until a religion came after me.

There was a series called ‘Game of Thrones’ which was very popular here in the United States, a post-Tolkien kind of thing. It was garbage, yet very addictive garbage – because there’s lots of violence, all the women take their clothes off all the time, and it’s kind of fun.

The accidents of my life have given me the ability to make stories in which different parts of the world are brought together, sometimes harmoniously, sometimes in conflict, and sometimes both – usually both. The difficulty in these stories is that if you write about everywhere you can end up writing about nowhere.

Many writers who have had to deal with the subject of atrocity can’t face it head-on.

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

What happened in Pakistan was that people were told: You’re all Muslim, so now you’re a country. As we saw in 1971 with the Bangladesh secession, the answer to that was: ‘Oh no, we’re not.’

Rohinton Mistry’s celebrated novel ‘Such a Long Journey‘ was pulled off the syllabus of Mumbai University because local extremists objected to its content.

In general, writers shouldn’t be killed for what they write, though I can think of exceptions.

The frustrating part of being tagged ‘controversial’ is people go looking for trouble where there isn’t any to look for.

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.

The West should be tougher on Pakistan. It is trying to play both ends against the middle – to look like the friend of the revolutionaries on the one hand and a friend of the West in the fight against terrorism. It can’t be both things.

Sometimes I think that when people become famous, there’s a public perception that they are not human beings any more. They don’t have feelings; they don’t get hurt; you can act and say as you like about them.

If I were dead, then nobody in England would have to fuss about the cost of my security and whether or not I merited such special treatment for so long.

Original thought, original artistic expression is by its very nature questioning, irreverent, iconoclastic.

I saw Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Django Unchained,’ and you could say a lot of things against it, but it was incredible fun. I don’t like blood and gore, and I am very squeamish about violence, but Tarantino’s violence is actually funny.

Hyperrealism can create an atmosphere of surrealism because nobody sees the world in such detail.

The gamble of literature is that I make the best work I can; the most truthful, the most representative of how I see things. I try and do that, and then I put it out there and say to you, ‘What do you think?’ I hope that you think well of it, obviously.

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.

The Republicans were not always insane. They might‘ve had politics I didn’t agree with, but they weren’t always actually certifiable.

You can take the boy out of Bombay; you can’t take Bombay out of the boy, you know.

In the movies, the writer is just the servant, the employee.

A mature society understands that at the heart of democracy is argument.

It may be that the books that were best liked in your lifetime are not the ones that are best liked 100 years later.

We all dream things into being; you imagine yourself having a child, and then you have a child. An inventor will think of something in his mind and then make it actual. So things are often passing from the imagined realm into the real world.

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

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

I’ve met the Dalai Lama briefly, but I would probably say my grandfather was the wisest person I ever met. He was my mother‘s father, an Indian, a family doctor, and very unlike me in that he was deeply religious.

Writers have been in terrible situations and have yet managed to produce extraordinary work.

I do have a lot of time for people in my life, and friendship is a very important subject for me. I think I’m unusual among the writers I know in that respect.

I have had many more close women friends than men, and I’ve always assumed that comes from the fact that in my family there was such a disproportionate female element.

Dissensions between Muslim nations run at least as deep, if not deeper, than those nations’ resentment of the West.

I think, in a written novel, the way in which you play with the readers‘ emotion or the way in which you engage the readers’ emotions can be very indirect. You could come at it through irony or comedy, etcetera, and you could capture people’s sympathies and feelings kind of by stealth if you like.

Vertigo is the conflict between the fear of falling and the desire to fall.

I’ve never yet managed to write a novel which didn’t have an Indian central character.

Nothing is unfilmable.

There are two things in Indian history – one is the incredible optimism and potential of the place, and the other is the betrayal of that potential – for example, corruption. Those two strands intertwine through the whole of Indian history, and maybe not just Indian history.

Pakistan is alarmed by the rising Indian influence in Afghanistan, and fears that an Afghanistan cleansed of the Taliban would be an Indian client state, thus sandwiching Pakistan between two hostile countries. The paranoia of Pakistan about India’s supposed dark machinations should never be underestimated.

If the culture shifts, if people think differently about women, the art will shift, too. You can’t ask art to make social change. It’s not what it’s for.

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

If you actually want to change your world, there is a better way of doing it than blowing yourself up.

I’m not a prophet, but I always thought it was natural for dictatorships to fall. I remember in 1989, two months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, had you said it was going to happen no one would have believed you. The system seemed powerful and unbreakable. Suddenly overnight it blew away like dust.

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.

It’s so disappointing, to put it mildly, that people know so much about my life. Because it means that they’re always trying to look at my books in terms of my life.

In writing ‘The Satanic Verses,’ I think I was writing for the first time from the whole of myself. The English part, the Indian part. The part of me that loves London, and the part that longs for Bombay. And at my typewriter, alone, I could indulge this.

This strange business of what it is to be a writer is this increasingly insane world in which we live, in which surrealism, it seems, is the new realism.

What I worry about and don’t like is the way in which the ideology of multiculturalism has declined into cultural relativism. I think that’s very dangerous. When the Archbishop of Canterbury, for God’s sake, says that you can’t have one law for everybody… that’s stupid.

Originality is dangerous.

When thought becomes excessively painful, action is the finest remedy.

Like everybody else, I’ve had relationships in which I was passionately in love but was completely miserable all the time and didn’t trust the person I was in love with one inch.

Look at history. It’s not the account of a species at peace.

The West sees Iran as an important force in the gulf.

The glamour of being forbidden must not be underestimated.

I remember when I was young, many cities in the Muslim world were cosmopolitan cities with a lot of culture.

If you take a look at history, you will find that the understanding of what is good and evil has always existed before the individual religions. The religions were only invented by people afterwards, in order to express this idea.

I used to write a monthly column for the ‘New York Times‘ syndicate. But I stopped because I found it really hard to have one extreme opinion a month. I don’t know how these columnists have two or three ideas a week; I was having difficulty having 12 things to say a year.

The world is always terrible.

The miniatures of the Mughal period are really the pinnacle of Indian artistic achievement. And not a single one of those paintings is done by an individual artist.

If Turkey wants to join Europe, it will have to become a European country, and that might take a long time.

It is literature which for me opened the mysterious and decisive doors of imagination and understanding. To see the way others see. To think the way others think. And above all, to feel.

Most American writers don’t get asked their opinion on current affairs, whereas in Europe and England, we still do. There are writers here who are the most sophisticated commentators, but they’re not asked. Like Don DeLillo, who sort of forecast most of the modern world before it happened.

When I’m writing a book, sentence by sentence, I’m not thinking theoretically. I’m just trying to work out the story from inside the characters I’ve got.

I think the veil is a way of taking power away from women.

I will come back to India – so deal with it.

Have you noticed the physical resemblance between Imran Khan and Gaddafi? If you were making a movie of the life of Gaddafi and you wanted a slightly better-looking version of Gaddafi, you might cast Imran Khan.

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?

The Chinese are good at repression and can be pretty ruthless about it.

Out-of-step intellectuals like Noam Chomsky and the deceased Edward Said have often been dismissed as crazy extremists, ‘anti-American,’ and in Mr. Said’s case even, absurdly, as apologists for Palestinian ‘terrorism.’

A relationship with an imaginary woman is preferable to a relationship with a real one.

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

Memory is a way of telling you what’s important to you.

Mo Yan is the Chinese equivalent of the Soviet Russian apparatchik writer Mikhail Sholokhov: a patsy of the regime.

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.

What I’ve always tried to find in my books are points at which the private lives of the characters, and also my own, intersect with the public life of the culture.

I have been a film buff all my life and believe that the finest cinema is fully the equal of the best novels.

One of the things I’ve learnt is not to depend on there being a woman in your life to make it work. I love my work, I love my children, I’ve got wonderful friends, you know, I have a nice life.

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

Airport security exists to guard us against terrorist attacks.

I hate admitting that my enemies have a point.

Bin Laden was born filthy rich and died in a rich man‘s house, which he had painstakingly built to the highest specifications.

I grew up reading ‘The Jungle Books’ and loving them.

I’m not saying I am never going to fall in love again, but there is no need to marry.

I was very happy in Bombay. I was good at school. There was no reason to change anything. I suppose it must have been some spirit of adventure, of wanting to see the world.

When you are writing a book, it feels as if you are simply concentrating on the world of the book and that whatever is happening in your personal life is outside the room, as it were. But maybe that’s just the way you have to talk to yourself to make it possible.

Sometimes you find your voice by trying to write like people, and sometimes you find it by trying to write unlike people.

We cannot allow religious hooligans to place limiting points on thought.

In today‘s U.S., it’s possible for almost anyone – women, gays, African-Americans, Jews – to run for, and be elected to, high office.

When you start writing about the stuff that is the central experience of your own life, you can talk about whatever you want, in whatever way you want.

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.

When people do the cowardly thing, it’s not about respect, it’s about fear.

You can’t have modern states based on ideas which have been out of date for a thousand years.

If you’re offended, it’s your problem.

Human beings, you see, do absolutely two primary things. We see like and unlike. Like becomes, in literature, simile and metaphor. Unlike becomes uniqueness and difference, from which I believe, the novel is born.

Self-censorship is a lie to yourself; if you are going to be trying to seriously create art, to create literary art, and you decide to hold back, to censor yourself, then you are a fool to yourself and it would be better that you kept your mouth shut and did not speak.

‘The Satanic Verses’ was denied the ordinary life of a novel. It became something smaller and uglier: an insult.

I’ve never seen anywhere in the world as beautiful as Kashmir. It has something to do with the fact that the valley is very small and the mountains are very big, so you have this miniature countryside surrounded by the Himalayas, and it’s just spectacular. And it’s true, the people are very beautiful too.

The West was involved in toppling the Mossadegh government. That ultimately led to the Iranian revolution.

One of the reasons my name is Rushdie is that my father was an admirer of Ibn Rush’d, the 12th century Arab philosopher known as Averroes in the West. In his time, he was making the non-literalist case for interpreting the Koran.

The writers of the French enlightenment had deliberately used blasphemy as a weapon, refusing to accept the power of the Church to set limiting points on thought.

Two things form the bedrock of any open society – freedom of expression and rule of law. If you don’t have those things, you don’t have a free country.

But there’s one thing we must all be clear about: terrorism is not the pursuit of legitimate goals by some sort of illegitimate means. Whatever the murderers may be trying to achieve, creating a better world certainly isn’t one of their goals. Instead they are out to murder innocent people.

I don’t like books that seem to want to teach me things. Which is not to say that one doesn’t learn from books – but you do your own learning in your own way.

Broad-mindedness is related to tolerance; open-mindedness is the sibling of peace.

If there were Israeli attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities, it makes it certain there would be a reprisal attack against the United States at some point.

In a novel, if you’re any good, you don’t just have good people or bad people. You have complicated people. You have real people.

It is often said by religious people that without its framework, there is no sense of right or wrong. My view is that religion comes after ethics.

Actually, I don’t even like parties. I would much prefer a room with four friends who sit around and have dinner. I detest nightclubs. And I don’t like places where the noise is so loud you can’t talk to people.

My children are English, and both of their mothers were English.

One of the extraordinary things about human events is that the unthinkable becomes thinkable.

The only way to find out why someone decides to engage in armed combat is to look at their individual personality.

If I had simply wanted to trade on an insult to Islam, I could have done it in a sentence rather than writing a 250,000-word novel, a work of fiction.

Speaking as somebody with three sisters and a very largely female Muslim family, there is not a single woman I know in my family or in their friends who would have accepted the wearing of a veil.

The whole story of migration and what that has done in interconnecting the planet is obviously something I’ve written about a lot.

Thomas Pynchon looks exactly like Thomas Pynchon should look. He is tall, he wears lumberjack shirts and blue jeans. He has Albert Einstein white hair and Bugs Bunny front teeth.

The difference between memoir and autobiography, as far as I see it, is that a memoir is there primarily to tell one particular story, whereas an autobiography tries to be a full account of a life.

In the experience of art, time seems not to exist.

When I’m writing books, something weird happens; and the result is the books contain a large amount of what you could call ‘supernaturalism.’ As a writer, I find I need that to explain the world I’m writing about.

I’ve been fascinated by Machiavelli since I was very young. I’ve always felt that he had a bad rap from history, and that he was actually a person quite unlike what we now think of as Machiavellian. He was a republican. He disliked totalitarian government.

British society has never been cleansed of the filth of imperialism.

I don’t know what to say about literary critics. I think it’s probably best to say nothing.

Friendships are the family we make – not the one we inherit. I’ve always been someone to whom friendship, elective affinities, is as important as family.

In the real world, immeasurable hurt is caused by terrorists based in Pakistan who attack countries like India.

The way you write a screenplay is that you close your eyes and run the movie in your head and then you write it down.

In any authoritarian society, the possessor of power dictates, and if you try and step outside, he will come after you. This is equally true of Sovietism, of China and of Iran, and in our time it has happened a lot in Islam. The point is that it’s worse when the authoritarianism is supported by something supernatural.

I think that a lot of us, whether we are religious or not – there are no words to express some things except religious words. For instance, ‘soul.’

I am certainly not a good Muslim. But I am able now to say that I am Muslim; in fact it is a source of happiness to say that I am now inside, and a part of the community whose values have always been closest to my heart.

Children like being a little scared, but they don’t want to be disturbed.

Anyone who has had the experience of going through American security checks knows the purpose of these checks is not to make you safer; it’s just to annoy you.

A purpose of our lives is to broaden what we can understand and say and therefore be.

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.

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.

I do think of Bombay as my hometown. Those are the streets I walked when I was learning to walk. And it’s the place that my imagination has returned to more than anywhere else.

The interesting thing about history sometimes. is that you know these people existed, and you knew what jobs they did, but you don’t know much about them as people, so you actually have to make them up.

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

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.

Every time you finish a book, you have a terrible feeling that there’s just never going to be another one. But fortunately, so far, the next one has always shown up.

Discovery is fun. I am incredibly open to everything.

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

I had a very difficult relationship with my father, which ended up okay, but there were many difficult years.

It’s obvious that I come down on the side of free speech for anybody‘s work.

Perhaps because my relationship with my father went through such a long, bumpy time, it’s been very important for me to work to try to keep lines of communication open between my sons and myself to try to avoid my father’s mistakes. At least if you’re making mistakes, make different mistakes.

I’ve never rejected the world I came from. To be rejected by it is horrible.

If bigots behave like bigots, it’s not a huge surprise.

I did a lot of student acting when I was young.

The Muslim population in India is, largely speaking, not radicalised. From the beginning, they were always very secular-minded.

People are always telling me that they’ve seen people reading my books on the subway, or the beach, or whenever.

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

When I was writing ‘The Satanic Verses,’ if you had asked me about the phenomenon that we all now know as radical Islam, I wouldn’t have had much to say. As recently as the mid-1980s, it didn’t seem to be a big deal.

The people suffering most from the Taliban were Afghans.

Whenever I write something, I always want to make sure that what I write is defensible.

I’ll tell you what divorce hasn’t taught me. It didn’t teach me not to get married again.

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.

If terrorism is to be defeated, the world of Islam must take on board the secularist-humanist principles on which the modern is based, and without which Muslim countries’ freedom will remain a distant dream.

I was 21 in 1968, so I’m as much a child of the ’60s as is possible to be. In those years the subject of religion had really almost disappeared; the idea that religion was going to be a major force in the life of our societies, in the West anyway, would have seemed absurd in 1968.

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

If my child had prejudice in his head, I’d be ashamed. I would see it as my failure as a parent.

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

Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory.

I am on Facebook, but mainly as a way to spy on my children. I find out more about them from their Facebook pages than from what they tell me.

The sixty-minute drama form has become very rich.

You don’t that often see writers being sought out when there are matters of great moment to discuss. And I think that’s a loss.

I don’t like books that play to the gallery, but I’ve become more concerned with telling a story as clearly and engagingly as I can.

I’m a reader of Chinese literature, I like their films, but also: I’ve had great difficulty getting my work published in China; very little of it has been published there. The first two attempts to have all of my work published, for instance, were refused without any reason ever being given.

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

I don’t feel American. I do feel like a New Yorker. I think there’s a real distinction there. A city allows you to become a citizen even when you’re not a national.

American literature has always been immigrant.

The answer to religion is not no religion, but another way of thinking of it. Another way of being in it.

Acting was always my unscratched itch, when I was in college and even afterwards.

England in a way is lucky. It’s an island, so the frontiers are given by the sea.

Cruelty is not a literary value.

The mistake of the West was to put the Sauds on the throne of Saudi Arabia and give them control of the world’s oil fortune, which they then used to propagate Wahhabi Islam.

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

You want all your books to stick around after you’ve gone.