The Best Salman Rushdie quotes

I don’t think there is a need for an entity like God in my life. — Salman Rushdie

We all owe death a life. — Salman Rushdie

Our lives teach us who we are. — Salman Rushdie

The fact of being alive compensated for what life did to one. — Salman Rushdie

There is nothing like a War for the reinvention of lives… — Salman Rushdie

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. — Salman Rushdie

Most of what matters in our lives takes place in our absence. — Salman Rushdie

To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world. — Salman Rushdie

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

Free speech is life itself. — Salman Rushdie

You never know the answers to the questions of life until you are asked. — Salman Rushdie

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

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

In the cookie of life, friends are the chocolate chips. — Salman Rushdie

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

Life is lived forward but is judged in reverse. — Salman Rushdie

If a birth is the fall–out from the explosion caused by the union of two unstable elements, then perhaps a half–life is all we can expect. — Salman Rushdie

Life is elsewhere. Cross frontiers. Fly away. — 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

Don’t you know girls have to fool people every day of their lives if they want to get anywhere? — Salman Rushdie

Freedom to reject is the only freedom. — Salman Rushdie

If there is a choice between absolute safety and freedom, then freedom must always prevail. — Salman Rushdie

Freedom is not a tea party, India. Freedom is a war. — Salman Rushdie

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

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

But I–and I just think it’s very–one of the problems of defending the extraordinary principle of freedom of speech is that you have to defend freedom of speech for people like that too. — Salman Rushdie

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

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

A man who invents himself needs someone to believe in him… Not only the need to be believed in, but the need to believe in another. You’ve got it: Love. — Salman Rushdie

If love is a yearning to be like (even to become) the beloved, then hatred, it must be said, can be engendered by the same ambition, when it cannot be fulfilled. — Salman Rushdie

Everybody loves ‘The Wire,’ and I think it’s okay, but in the end it’s just a police series. — Salman Rushdie

One either loves, or waits for love, or banishes love for good. That is the full range of possible choices. — Salman Rushdie

My love for Dan Brown knows no bounds. It literally has no mass. — Salman Rushdie

Ignorantly is how we all fall in love; for it is a kind of fall. Closing our eyes, we leap from that cliff in hope of a soft landing. Nor is it always soft; but still, without that leap nobody comes to life. — Salman Rushdie

What’s the use of stories that aren’t even true? — Salman Rushdie

No story comes from nowhere; new stories are born from old. — 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

Perhaps the story you finish is never the one you begin. — Salman Rushdie

When we stop believing in the gods we can start believing in their stories. — Salman Rushdie

Man is the Storytelling Animal, and that in stories are his identity, his meaning, and his lifeblood. — Salman Rushdie

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

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. — Salman Rushdie

We are the only animals that tell stories to understand the world we live in. — Salman Rushdie

I became a writer because I got addicted to story. The first storyteller in my life was my father. — Salman Rushdie

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. — Salman Rushdie

I’m not a big fan of there being voiceovers in movies. I really prefer it when the film tells it story. — Salman Rushdie

Happy endings must come at the end of something,’ the Walrus pointed out. ‘If they happen in the middle of a story, or an adventure, or the like, all they do is cheer things up for awhile. — Salman Rushdie

I want to write novels. I want to write stories. I want to do the stuff that I became a writer to do. — Salman Rushdie

Even when things are at their worst, there’s a little voice in your head saying, ‘Good story!’ — Salman Rushdie

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

It’s a terrible thing that your life turns into a good story. — Salman Rushdie

Once you put a thought into the world, it can be disagreed with, but it can’t be unthought. — Salman Rushdie

Thought I was doing two things. One is inquiring into the phenomenon of revelation, if you are not a religious person. But, clearly, it’s a sincere phenomenon. — Salman Rushdie

To respect Louis Farrakhan, we must understand, is simply to agree with him… If dissent is now also to be thought of as a form of ‘dissing,’ then we have indeed succumbed to the thought police. — Salman Rushdie

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

Why speak if you can’t manage perfect thoughts, perfect sentences? — Salman Rushdie

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

I always thought storytelling was like juggling […] You keep a lot of different tales in the air, and juggle them up and down, and if you’re good you don’t drop any. — Salman Rushdie

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

Without water we are nothing’, the traveler thought. ‘Even an emperor, denied water, would swiftly turn to dust. Water is the real monarch and we are all its slaves. — Salman Rushdie

I only met Margaret Thatcher twice. The thing that I thought about meeting her was how extraordinarily intelligent she was. You really had to be on your game otherwise she’d make mincemeat of you. — Salman Rushdie

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

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

No people whose word for ‘yesterday’ is the same as their word for ‘tomorrow’ can be said to have a firm grip on the time. — Salman Rushdie

Fundamentalists of all faiths are the fundamental evil of our time. — Salman Rushdie

It just requires so much of you, and most of the time you feel dumb. — Salman Rushdie

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

The time–honored role of the artist [is] to speak truth to power. — Salman Rushdie

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. — Salman Rushdie

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. — Salman Rushdie

Very often, people who actually pick up a book of mine for the first time are kind of surprised. And I get these letters saying, well, who knew that you were good, you know? — Salman Rushdie

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

I learned: the first lesson of my life: nobody can face the world with his eyes open all the time. — Salman Rushdie

We live in a frightened time, and people self–censor all the time and are afraid of going into some subjects because they are worried about violent reactions. — Salman Rushdie

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

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

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

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

I’m a world expert on superhero comics. I think maybe only Michael Chabon knows more than me. — Salman Rushdie

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

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

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. — Salman Rushdie

I’m a novelist. Fortunately I don’t have to rule the world. — Salman Rushdie

I do not envy people who think they have a complete explanation of the world, for the simple reason that they are obviously wrong. — Salman Rushdie

Peace, perfect peace, in this dark world of sin? The Blood of Jesus whispers peace within. — Salman Rushdie

The world, somebody wrote, is the place we prove real by dying in it. — Salman Rushdie

Religion is responsible for a lot of the problems in the history of the world and it’s not something that I practice or recommend, but to each his own. — Salman Rushdie

If you have children you worry about the world you’re leaving them. — Salman Rushdie

Writers have an opinion about the world and offer arguments about the world. They should offer contemplation. — Salman Rushdie

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

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

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

Sometimes great, banned works defy the censor’s description and impose themselves on the world–’Ulysses,’ ‘Lolita,’ the ‘Arabian Nights.’ — Salman Rushdie

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

I do think that there is such a thing as human nature, and that the things that we have in common are perhaps greater than the things that divide us. — Salman Rushdie

This may be the curse of human race . Not that we are different from one anther , but we are so alike . — Salman Rushdie

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

The inevitable triumph of illusion over reality that was the single most obvious truth about the history of the human race […] — Salman Rushdie

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

Can one drown in one’s element… If fish can drown in water, can human beings suffocate in air? — Salman Rushdie

It prevents us from being the kind of creatures that we are. It is not something which is specific to one culture. It is something universal to human beings. — Salman Rushdie

It’s true that the human body is more vulnerable than the products of the human mind. We need to protect artists and journalists people to allow them to work. — Salman Rushdie