Salman Rushdie Quotes

Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, power to retell it, to rethin...

When you have children, your perspective on the parent-child relationship alters.

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

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

Free societies...are societies in motion, and with motion comes tension, dissent, friction. Free peo...

I dislike arranged marriages. There are some mistakes for which one should not be able to blame one'...

Until you know who you are you can’t write.

[What Rushdie took away from reading Gunter Grass's The Tin Drum]: Go for broke. Always try and do t...

As though she had entered a fable, as though she were no more than words crawling along a dry page, ...

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

It is literature which for me opened the mysterious and decisive doors of imagination and understand...

The moment you say that any idea system is sacred, whether it’s a religious belief system or a secul...

I've always prided myself on my discipline as a writer. I do it like a job. I get up in the morning ...

..now, seated hunched over paper in a pool of Anglepoised light, I no longer want to be anything exc...

...because it is the privilige and the curse of midnight's children to be both masters and victims o...

for to the arguments of great thinkers there is no end, the idea of argument itself being a tool to ...

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

Alone, [Chamcha] all at once remembered that he and Pamela had once disagreed, as they disagreed on ...

I do have a lot of time for people in my life, and friendship is a very important subject for me. I ...

A poet's work . . . to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape...

Two things form the bedrock of any open society - freedom of expression and rule of law. If you don'...

When thought becomes excessively painful action is the finest remedy.

A book is not completed till it's read.

Most of the oppression of Muslims in the world right now is carried out by other Muslims.

Sometimes I think that when people become famous, there's a public perception that they are not huma...

If terrorism is to be defeated, the world of Islam must take on board the secularist-humanist princi...

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

The enemy for the fanatic is pleasure, which makes it extremely important to continue to indulge in ...

The suicide bomber's imagination leads him to believe in a brilliant act of heroism, when in fact he...

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

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

I'm not a big fan of there being voiceovers in movies. I really prefer it when the film tells it sto...

Perhaps because my relationship with my father went through such a long, bumpy time, it's been very ...

Someone asked me if I was afraid to write my memoirs. I told him: 'We have to stop drawing up accoun...

Nobody has the right to not be offended. That right doesn't exist in any declaration I have ever rea...

There's a lot of conflict and darkness inside everybody's family. We all pretend to outsiders that i...

It may be that writers in my position,exiles, or emigrants or expatriates, are haunted by some sense...

A question I have often asked is, ‘What would an inoffensive political cartoon look like?’ What woul...

An attack upon our ability to tell stories is not just censorship - it is a crime against our nature...

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

You are ass and I like class. I like diamonds, you are a glass. You brown mouse, I like black cats. ...

Mourn for the living, the dead have got their camphor gardens.

It seems that the right of freedom of speech that was enshrined in numerous constitutions is now und...

Two things form the bedrock of any open society — freedom of expression and rule of law. If you don’...

If we can cease envisaging ourselves as metaphorical foetuses, and substitute the image of a newborn...

Throughout human history, the apostles of purity, those who have claimed to possess a total explanat...

Everyone had learned that it was worth giving up privacy for the merest possibility of fame, and the...

Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts.

The life of this alien city was lived under the cathedral dome of the sky. People ate where the bird...

One minute you've got a lucky star watching over you and the next instant it's done a bunk.

History is unkind to those it abandons, and can be equally unkind to those who make it.

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

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

Friendships are the family we make - not the one we inherit. I've always been someone to whom friend...

When 'Midnight's Children' came out, people in the West tended to respond to the fantasy elements in...

I do think of Bombay as my hometown. Those are the streets I walked when I was learning to walk. And...

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

This is going to make me sound ancient, but I remember Juhu Beach when there weren't any buildings o...

What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second,...

The question I'm always asking myself is: are we masters or victims? Do we make history, or does his...

In this world without quiet corners, there can be no easy escapes from history, from hullabaloo, fro...

It is often said by religious people that without its framework, there is no sense of right or wrong...

Religion, a mediaeval form of unreason, when combined with modern weaponry becomes a real threat to ...

OK, publishing a book and releasing a movie is all very well, but Tottenham beating Man. U. 3-2... p...

He had been reborn into the knowledge of death; and the inescapability of change, of things-never-th...

The great are eternally at the mercy of tiny men. And also, tiny madwomen.

Nothing is forever, he thought beyond closed eyelids somewhere over Asia Minor. Maybe unhappiness is...

When you write, you write out of your best self. Everything else drops away.

Only the foolish, blinded by language's conventions, think of fire as red or gold. Fire is blue at i...

Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human ...

Among the great struggles of man-good/evil, reason/unreason, etc.-there is also this mighty conflict...

A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape t...

It was important not to offend against the laws of magic. If a woman left you it was because you did...

If you look at Indian movies, every time they wanted an exotic locale, they would have a dance numbe...

Yes, and words are not deeds, Solanka allowed, moving off fretfully. Though words can become deeds. ...

Our lives teach us who we are." I have learned the hard way that when you permit anyone else's descr...

Don't let the zealots make Muslim a terrifying

Many of us persons of the tinted persuasion care about human rights and artistic freedom too.

When a reader falls in love with a book, it leaves its essence inside him, like radioactive fallout ...

Sometimes, people trying to commit suicide manage it in a manner that leaves them breathless with as...

Fury...sexual, Oedipal, political, magical, brutal....drives us to our finest heights and coarsest d...

I don't like books that seem to want to teach me things. Which is not to say that one doesn't learn ...

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

There is nothing intrinsic linking any religion with any act of violence. The crusades don't prove t...

Rock and roll music - the music of freedom frightens people and unleashes all manner of conservative...

Obviously, a rigid, blinkered, absolutist world view is the easiest to keep hold of, whereas the flu...

There are those of us who learn to live completely in the moment. For such people the Past vanishes ...

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

I'd rather die fighting over great poets than over gods.

The moment you say that any idea system is sacred, whether it’s a religious belief system or a secul...

Like everybody else, I've had relationships in which I was passionately in love but was completely m...

As a writer, one of the things we all learned from the movies was a kind of compression that didn't ...

When you throw everything up in the air anything becomes possible.

When he was young, he told her, each phase of his life, each self he tried on, had seemed reassuring...

Women have always moaned about men...but it turns out that their deepest complaints are reserved for...

We, the public, are easily, lethally offended. We have come to think of taking offence as a fundamen...

Did you know, ji,’ Zulu offered, ‘that the map of Tolkien’s Middle earth fits quite well over centra...

At sixteen, you still think you can escape from your father. You aren't listening to his voice speak...

What kind of Christmas present would Jesus ask Santa for?

...they all were, in the grip of a huge fantasy: the idea that men would not be judged by who they o...

Khattam-Shud,' he said slowly, 'is the Arch-Enemy of all Stories, even of language itself. He is the...