Salman Rushdie
writer, novelist, essayist, screenwriter, children's writer, actor, author
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All Quotes by Salman Rushdie
“What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry.”
“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.”
“Throughout human history, the apostles of purity, those who have claimed to possess a total explanation, have wrought havoc among mere mixed-up human beings.”
“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.”
“...this is our tragedy, she said in his words, our fictions are killing us, but if we didn’t have those fictions, maybe that would kill us too.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“He knew that his father had finally run hard enough and long enough to wear down the frontiers between the worlds, he had run clear out of his skin and into the arms of his wife, to whom he had proved, once and for all, the superiority of his love. Some migrants are happy to depart.”
“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.”
“How treacherous history is! Half-truths, ignorance, deceptions, false trails, errors, and lies, and buried somewhere in between all of that, the truth, in which it is easy to lose faith, of which it is consequently easy to say, it’s a chimera, there’s no such thing, everything is relative, one man’s absolute belief is another man’s fairy tale; but about which we insist, we insist most emphatically, that it is too important an idea to give up to the relativity merchants.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“It matters, it always matters, to name rubbish as rubbish … to do otherwise is to legitimize it.”
“God, Satan, Paradise, and Hell all vanished one day in my fifteenth year, when I quite abruptly lost my faith. … and afterwards, to prove my new-found atheism, I bought myself a rather tasteless ham sandwich, and so partook for the first time of the forbidden flesh of the swine. No thunderbolt arrived to strike me down. … From that day to this I have thought of myself as a wholly secular person.”
“The responsibility for violence lies with those who perpetrate 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.”
“I don't think there is a need for an entity like God in my life.”
“I do not envy people who think they have a complete explanation of the world, for the simple reason that they are obviously wrong.”
“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.”
“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.”
“The only people who see the whole picture are the ones who step outside the frame.”
“What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.”
“I've been worrying about God a little bit lately. It seems as if he's been lashing out, you know, destroying cities, annihilating places. It seems like he's been in a bad mood. And I think it has to do with the quality of lovers he's been getting. If you look at the people who love God now, you know, if I was God, I'd need to destroy something.”
“What kind of God is it who's upset by a cartoon in Danish?”
“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.”
“Children are the vessels into which adults pour their poison.”
“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 world, somebody wrote, is the place we prove real by dying in it.”
“There is no right in the world not to be offended. That right simply doesn’t exist. In a free society, an open society, people have strong opinions, and these opinions very often clash. In a democracy, we have to learn to deal with this. And this is true about novels, it’s true about cartoons, it’s true about all these products.”
“A question I have often asked is, ‘What would an inoffensive political cartoon look like?’ What would a respectful cartoon look like? The form requires disrespect and so if we are going to have in the world things like cartoons and satire, we just have to accept it as part of the price of freedom.”
“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.”
“What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.”
“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.”
“Memory's truth, because 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.”
“Fury...sexual, Oedipal, political, magical, brutal....drives us to our finest heights and coarsest depths”
“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.”