Skip to content

Salman Rushdie Quotes

born 1947 India

Sir Salman Rushdie (born Ahmed Salman Rushdie, Urdu: أحمد سلمان رشدی, Hindi: अह्मद सलमान रश्डी on 19 June 1947) is an Indian-born British novelist and essayist. Most of his work is set on the Indian subcontinent.

India
Essayists
Film producers
Novelists
Playwrights

Also known as: Rushdie, Rushdie, (Ahmed) Salman, Satanic Verses controversy, The Satanic Verses controversy

Random Salman Rushdie quote

44 quotes

I repeat for the last time: to understand me, you'll have to swallow a world.

Midnight's Children (1981)

What kind of God is it who's upset by a cartoon in Danish?

Nothing really improves us. Whatever improves one person will disimprove another.

Salon interview (1996)

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

The Satanic Verses (1988)

Who what am I? My answer: I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me.

Midnight's Children (1981)

Children are the vessels into which adults pour their poison.

Midnight's Children (1981)

Ibn Rushd's ideas were silenced in their time.

Address at Columbia University (1991)

Obviously, a rigid, blinkered, absolutist world view is the easiest to keep hold of, whereas the fluid, uncertain, metamorphic picture I've always carried about is rather more vulnerable.

Address at Columbia University (1991)

Reprehensible ideas don’t disappear if you make them illegal, by driving them under the carpet you might feed them, or make them taboo ... I’d rather know the racist in the room.

And if that plunges me into contradiction and paradox, so be it; I've lived in that messy ocean all my life. I've fished in it for my art.

Address at Columbia University (1991)

There is a point beyond which conciliation looks like capitulation. I do not believe I passed that point, but others have thought otherwise.

Address at Columbia University (1991)

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 of the heart.

To make Gandhi appeal to the Western market, he had to be sanctified and turned into Christ – an odd fate for a crafty Gujarati lawyer – and the history of one of the century's greatest revolutions had to be mangled.

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.

The Satanic Verses (1988)

It's fun to read things when you don't know all the words. Even children love it.

Salon interview (1996)

It's the very playful, very natural result of juggling languages. You are always reaching for the most appropriate phrase.

Salon interview (1996)

When I was growing up, everyone around me was fond of fooling around with words.

Salon interview (1996)

So they come up against weird words, and the weird words excite them.

Salon interview (1996)

Just wondering if the Royal Society of Literature is "impartial" about attempted murder, @BernardineEvari? (Asking for a friend.)

In an ideal world you could reunite the Pakistan-occupied part of Kashmir with the Indian-occupied part and restore the old borders. You could have both India and Pakistan agreeing to guarantee those borders, demilitarise the area, and to invest in it economically. In a sane world that would happen but we don't live in a sane world.

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Salman Rushdie (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.