A collection of quotes and sayings by Salman Rushdie on courage, writing, censorship, speech, destiny, existence, God, inhumanity, dogma, aim, regrets and ideas.
97 Famous Salman Rushdie Quotes That We Can't Ignore
Salman Rushdie is a renowned British Indian novelist and essayist, known as the most controversial novelist of the 20th century. He was born in Bombay, British India, in a wealthy family and pursued his graduation from the University of Cambridge. He debuted in his writing career with ‘Grimus’ which was a great blend of fantasy and science fiction but was not successful. He hit back the literary world with his next book titled ‘Midnight's Children’ which was very successful. In this book he portrayed the history of India from the perspective of a laborer. This book was honored with some of the most renowned awards including the ‘Booker Prize’ and the ‘James Tait Black Memorial Prize’. He further published ‘The Satanic Verses’ which continues to be the most controversial book of his career and it also brought him various accolades including the ‘Whitbread Book Award’. The book was condemned for blasphemy against Islam and a bounty was announced for his head by the Islamic leader of Iran. These controversies could not stop him from writing and expressing his thoughts through his books and novels. He successfully published his works to justify his reputation as a writer. Salman Rushdie is quite often in the news for his radical views; he also shares his views on several political, social, religious and literary issues. We have compiled his quotes from his novels, writings, speeches, interviews and his general life. Take a look at the quotes and thoughts by Salman Rushdie who has a completely different take on religion and world.
Free societies...are societies in motion, and with motion comes tension, dissent, friction. Free people strike sparks, and those sparks are the best evidence of freedom's existence.
Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems - but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible.
Make as much racket as you like people. Noise is life and an excess of noise is a sign that life is good. There will be time for us all to be quiet when we are safely dead.
Having been borne across the world, we are translated men. It is normally supposed that something always gets lost in translation; I cling, obstinately, to the notion that something can also be gained.
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.
People don't like being around despair. Our tolerance for the truly hopeless, for those who are irredeemably broken by life is strictly limited. The sob stories we like are the ones that end before we're bored.
Exile is a dream of a glorious return. Exile is a vision of revolution: Elba, not St Helena. It is an endless paradox: looking forward by always looking back. The exile is a ball hurled high into the air.
Only the foolish, blinded by language's conventions, think of fire as red or gold. Fire is blue at it's melancholy rim, green in it's envious heart. It may burn white, or even, in it's greatest rages, black.
Nobody can judge an internal injury by the size of the superficial wound.
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.
The inevitable triumph of illusion over reality that was the single most obvious truth about the history of the human race.
Salman Rushdie
What's the use of stories that aren't even true?
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.
Between shame and shamelessness lies the axis upon which we turn; meteorological conditions at both these poles are of the most extreme, ferocious type. Shamelessness, shame: the roots of violence.
Salman Rushdie
A people that has remained convinced of its greatness and invulnerability, that has chosen to believe such a myth in the face of all the evidence, is a people in the grip of a kind of sleep, or madness.
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
A man who catches History's eye is thereafter bound to a mistress from whom he will never escape.
Wherever goodness lay, it did not lie in ritual, unthinking obeisance before a deity but rather, perhaps, in the slow clumsy, error-strewn working out of an individual or collective path.
Salman Rushdie
One either loves, or waits for love, or banishes love for good. That is the full range of possible choices.
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.
We are the only animals that tell stories to understand the world we live in.
Salman Rushdie
All names mean something.
Salman Rushdie
Believe in your own eyes and you'll get into a lot of trouble, hot water, a mess.
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
Man is the Storytelling Animal, and that in stories are his identity, his meaning, and his lifeblood.
Salman Rushdie
One minute you've got a lucky star watching over you and the next instant it's done a bunk.
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 the beloved, then hatred, it must be said, can be engendered by the same ambition, when it cannot be fulfilled. )
