Salman Rushdie Quotes

You will see, as time goes by", said Ibn Rushd, "that in the end it will be religion that will make men turn away from God. The godly are God's worst advocates.

We have the freedoms we fight for, and we lose those we don't defend.

The word 'translation' comes, etymologically, from the Latin for 'bearing across'. 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.

You are ass and I like class. I like diamonds, you are a glass. You brown mouse, I like black cats. You boy pussy but i like tom cats. Just because you got the dance, don't think you stand a fucking chance.

Zembla, Zenda, Xanadu:
All our dream-worlds may come true.
Fairy lands are fearsome too.
As I wander far from view
Read, and bring me home to you.

I've never yet managed to write a novel which didn't have an Indian central character.

Acting was always my unscratched itch, when I was in college and even afterwards.

And by that destiny, to perform an act Whereof what's past is prologue, what to come In yours and my discharge.

In the '50s, listening to Elvis and others on the radio in Bombay - it didn't feel alien. Noises made by a truck driver from Tupelo, Mississippi, seemed relevant to a middle-class kid growing up on the other side of the world. That has always fascinated me.

Life is a shit sandwich. The more bread you've got, the less shit you eat.

Methwold's hair, parted in the middle has a lot to do with my beginnings. It was one of those hairlines along which history and sexuality moved.

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.

Games sometimes require lateral thinking. They sometimes require quite skilled hand-eye coordination and so on. But they're not in any sense intelligent in the way that you want your children to develop intelligence to make the mind not just supple, but actually informed.

In the end, everyone can do without fathers

I've always thought that one of the things that the Internet and the gaming world permits as a narrative technique is to not tell the story from beginning to end - to tell stories sideways, to give alternative possibilities that the reader can, in a way, choose between.

Both John F. Kennedy and Nelson Mandela use the same three-word phrase which in my mind says it all, which is, 'Freedom is Indivisible,' you can't slice it up, otherwise it ceases to be freedom. You can dislike Charlie Hedbo ... But the fact that you dislike them has nothing to do with their right to speak.

I'm a world expert on superhero comics. I think maybe only Michael Chabon knows more than me.

They were deeply in love, which beats earplugs.

The First Amendment defends all forms of speech including hate speech, which is why groups like Ku Klux Klan are allowed to utter their poisonous remarks.

I used to write a monthly column for the 'New York Times' syndicate. But I stopped because I found it really hard to have one extreme opinion a month. I don't know how these columnists have two or three ideas a week; I was having difficulty having 12 things to say a year.

When people use the term magic realism, usually they only mean 'magic' and they don't hear 'realism', whereas the way in which magic realism actually works is for the magic to be rooted in the real. It's both things. It's not just a fairytale moment. It's the surrealism that arises out of the real.

The black ice of that dark fortress received the sunlight like a mortal wound.

Fear was stronger than ethics, stronger than judgement, stronger than responsibility, stronger than civilisation. Fear was a bolting animal trampling children underfoot as it fled from itself. Fear was a bigot, a tyrant, a coward, a red mist, a whore. Fear was a bullet pointed at his heart.

Instead of making myself write the book I ought to write, the novel that was expected of me, I conjured up the book I myself would have liked to read, the sort by an unknown writer, from another age and another country, discovered in an attic. ITALO CALVINO

Gibreel, the tuneless soloist, had been cavorting in moonlight as he sang his impromptu gazal, swimming in air, butterfly-stroke, breast-stroke, bunching himself into a ball, spreadeagling himself against the almost-infinity of the almost-dawn, adopting heraldic postures, rampant, couchant, pitting levity against gravity. Now he rolled happily towards the sardonic voice. 'Ohe, Salad baba, it's you, too good. What-ho, old Chumch.' At which the other, a fastidious shadow falling headfirst in a grey suit with all the jacket buttons done up, arms by his sides, taking for granted the improbability of the bowler hat on his head, pulled a nickname-hater's face. 'Hey, Spoono,' Gibreel yelled, eliciting a second inverted wince, 'Proper London, bhai! Here we come! Those bastards down there won't know what hit them. Meteor or lightning or vengeance of God. Out of thin air, baby.

I want to suggest to you that citizens of free societies, democracies, do not preserve their freedom by pussyfooting around their fellow-citizen's opinions, even their most cherished beliefs. In free societies, you must have the free play of ideas. There must be argument, and it must be impassioned and untrammeled. A free society is not calm and eventless place - that is the kind of static, dead society dictators try to create. Free societies are dynamic, noisy, turbulent, and full of radical disagreements. Skepticism and freedom are indissolubly linked; and it is the skepticism of journalists, their show-me, prove-it unwillingness to be impressed, that is perhaps their most important contribution to the freedom of the free world. It is the disrespect of journalists-for power, for orthodoxies, for party lines, for ideologies, for vanity, for arrogance, for folly, for pretension, for corruption, for stupidity, maybe even for editors-that I would like to celebrate...and that I urge you all, in freedom's name, to preserve.

The act of migration puts into crisis everything about the migrating individual or group, everything about identity and selfhood and culture and belief. So if this is a novel about migration it must be that act of putting in question. It must perform the crisis it describes.

My horizon's have shrunk and I have only endings to write.

Anyone who reads my work will see that there are often difficult relationships between fathers and sons.

In writing 'The Satanic Verses,' I think I was writing for the first time from the whole of myself. The English part, the Indian part. The part of me that loves London, and the part that longs for Bombay. And at my typewriter, alone, I could indulge this.

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

That was how we spoke, my mother and I: in puns and games and rhymes. In, you might say, lyrics. This was our tragedy. We were language's magpies by nature, stealing whatever sounded bright and shiny. We were tinpan alleycats, but the gift of music had been withheld. We could not sing along, though we always knew the words. Still, defiantly, we roared our tuneless roars, we fell off the high notes and were trampled by the low ones. And if bitter ices were the consequence, well, there were worse fates in the world than that.

Religion, a medieval form of unreason, when combined with modern weaponry becomes a real threat to our freedoms. This religious totalitarianism has caused a deadly mutation in the heart of Islam and we see the tragic consequences in Paris today.

Meaning is a shaky edifice we build out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old fillms, small victories, people hated, people loved; perhaps it is because our sense of what is the case is constructed from such inadequate materials that we defend it so fiercely, even to death.

Captain Ahab drowned, he reminded himself; it was the trimmer, Ishmael, who survived.

The point is always reached after which the gods no longer share their lives with mortal men and women, they die or wither away or retire ... Now that they've gone, the high drama's over. What remains is ordinary human life.

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

As a writer, one of the things we all learned from the movies was a kind of compression that didn't exist before people were used to watching films. For instance, if you wanted to write a flashback in a novel, you once had to really contextualize it a lot, to set it up. Now, readers know exactly what you're doing. Close-ups, too.

Memory is a way of telling you what's important to you.

Music, love, death. Certainly a triangle of sorts; maybe even an eternal one.
"The only people who can see the whole picture," he murmured, "are the ones who step out of the frame." (The ground beneath her feet.)

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

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

History could claw upward as well as down. The powerful could be deafened by the cries of the poor.

I don't like books that play to the gallery, but I've become more concerned with telling a story as clearly and engagingly as I can.

He never comprehended the desperation in her dazzling, permanent smile, the terror in the brightness with which she faced the world, or the reasons why she hid when she couldn't manage to beam.

In the waking dreams our societies permit, in our myths, our arts, our songs, we celebrate the nonbelongers, the different ones, the outlaws, the freaks.

We are the Sublime Radiance, the Star of India, and the Sun of Glory," said the emperor, who knew a thing or two about flattery himself, "yet we were raised in that shit-hole dump of a town where men fuck women to make babies but fuck boys to make them men- raised watching out for the attacker who worked from behind as well the warrior straight ahead ... Is that how a king should be raised, Bhakti Ram Jain?" the emperor roared, tipping over the basin in his wrath. "Illiterate, ass-guarding, savage- is that what a prince should be?

I don't think it is always necessary to take up the anti-colonial
or is it post-colonial?
cudgels against English. What seems to me to be happening is that those people who were once colonized by the language are now rapidly remaking it, domesticating it, becoming more and more relaxed about the way they use it
assisted by the English language's enormous flexibility and size, they are carving out large territories for themselves within its frontiers.

Rohinton Mistry's celebrated novel 'Such a Long Journey' was pulled off the syllabus of Mumbai University because local extremists objected to its content.

Unhappy endings might seem more realistic than happy ones, but reality often contained a streak of fantasy that realism lacked.

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.

...we often imagined, as we drove, a fictional universe in which Fitzgerald's and Wodehouse's creations might visit one another. Bertie Wooster and Jeeves might have intruded on the rarefied world of the Eggs, silly-ass Bertie stepping into sensible Nick Carraway's shoes, and Reginald Jeeves the fish-eating Spinoza-loving gentleman's gentleman and genius finding a way to give Jay Gatsby the happy-ever-after ending with Daisy Buchanan for which he so profoundly longed.

I write books I'd enjoy reading, I'm the reader standing behind my shoulder.

Be sure that you go to the author to get at his meaning, not to find yours.

I don't read my books, I write them. Once I've finished the many years it usually takes me to write them, I can't bear to read them, because I've spent too long with them already. I'm not advertising them very well, am I?

Live on, survive, for the earth gives forth wonders. It may swallow your heart, but the wonders keep on coming. You stand before them bareheaded, shriven. What is expected of you is attention.
Your songs are your planets. Live on them but make no home there.
What you write about, you lose. What you sing, leaves you on the wings of song.
Sing against death. Command the wildness of the city.
Freedom to reject is the only freedom. Freedom to uphold is dangerous.
Life is elsewhere. Cross frontiers. Fly away.

When you start writing about the stuff that is the central experience of your own life, you can talk about whatever you want, in whatever way you want.

I seem to have fallen for women with missing parents. Goodness knows what it signifies.

India, the new myth
a collective fiction in which anything was possible, a fable rivalled only by the two other mighty fantasies: money and God.

Many writers who have had to deal with the subject of atrocity can't face it head-on.

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.

A poet's work ... to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep.

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

The leisure class, a.k.a. the landed gentry, on whom my business depends," he told Geronimo Manezes, "are the hunters, not the gatherers; they make their way by the immoral road of exploitation, not the virtuous path of industry. But I, to make my way, have to treat the rich as the good guys, the lions, the creators of wealth and guardians of freedom, which naturally I don't mind doing because I'm an exploiter too and I also want to think of myself as virtuous.

Fundamentalism isn't about religion, it's about power.

This was Heather Kozar, the newly elected Playmate of the Year, a very young girl with excellent manners who disappointingly insisted on calling him sir. "I'm sorry, sir, I haven't read any of your books," she apologized. "To tell you the truth, I don't read a lot of books, sir, because they make me feel tired and go to sleep." Yes, yes, he agreed, he often felt exactly the same way. "But there are some books, sir," she added, "like Vogue, which I feel I have to read to keep up with what's going on.

Reality can have metaphorical content; that does not make it less real.

Realism can break a writer's heart.

We, the living, must find what space we can alongside them; the giant dead whom we cannot tie down, though we grasp at their hair, though we rope them while they sleep

Writers shouldn't have lives that are interesting. It gets in the way of your work.

There was a series called 'Game of Thrones' which was very popular here in the United States, a post-Tolkien kind of thing. It was garbage, yet very addictive garbage - because there's lots of violence, all the women take their clothes off all the time, and it's kind of fun.

Look at history. It's not the account of a species at peace.

The suicide bomber's imagination leads him to believe in a brilliant act of heroism, when in fact he is simply blowing himself up pointlessly and taking other people's lives.

Rashid did not give in. "Look how his hands move on the contols," he told her. "In those worlds left-handedness does not impede him. Amazingly, he is almost ambidextrous." Soraya snorted with annoyance. "Have you seen his handwriting?" she said. "Will his hedgehogs and plumbers help with that? Will his 'pisps' and 'wees' get him through school? Such names! They sound like going to the bathroom or what." Rashid began to smile placatingly. "The term is consoles," he began but Soraya turned on her heel and walked away, waving one hand high above her head. "Do not speak to me of such things," she said over her shoulder, speaking in her grandest voice. "I am in-console-able.

Fact is,' he said without any of his usual bonhomie, 'religious fafaith, which encodes the highest ass ass aspirations of human race, is now, in our cocountry, the servant of lowest instincts, and gogo God is the creature of evil.

What kind of God is it who's upset by a cartoon in Danish?
[Interview with Bill Moyers, Bill Moyers on Faith & Reason, June 23, 2006]

BOMBAY WAS CENTRAL, had been so from the moment of its creation: the bastard child of a Portuguese-English wedding, and yet the most Indian of Indian cities. In Bombay all Indias met and merged. In Bombay, too, all-India met what-was-not-India, what came across the black water to flow into our veins. Everything north of Bombay was North India, everything south of it was the South. To the east lay India's East and to the west, the world's West. Bombay was central; all rivers flowed into its human sea. It was an ocean of stories; we were all its narrators, and everybody talked at once.

Go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets. Take a deep breath before you begin talking. Aim for the stars. Keep grinning. Be bloody-minded. Argue with the world. And never forget that writing is as close as we get to keeping a hold on the thousand and one things
childhood, certainties, cities, doubts, dreams, instants, phrases, parents, loves
that go on slipping , like sand, through our fingers.

I don't know what to say about literary critics. I think it's probably best to say nothing.

Question: What is the opposite of faith?

Not disbelief. Too final, certain, closed. Itself is a kind of belief.

Doubt.

She says, trying uselessly to console me: 'What are you so long for in your face? Everybody forgets some small things, all the time!'
But if small things go, will large things be close behind?

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

Human beings do not perceive things whole; we are not gods but wounded creatures, cracked lenses, capable only of fractured perceptions

Trapped inside a metaphor, I've often felt the need to re-describe it, to change the terms. This isn't so much a balloon, I've wanted to say, as a bubble within which I'm simultaneously exposed and sealed off ... depriving me of reality, reducing me to an abstraction ...
[NY, Dec. 1991; Columbia Graduate School Of Journalism Speech]

A few seconds later, my father broke his big toe; but his accident was a mere trifle when set beside what had befallen me in that benighted moment, because thanks to the occult tyrannies of those blandly saluting clocks I had been mysteriously handcuffed to history, my destinies indissolubly chained to those of my country.

They like the making of mischief, mayhem, anarchy. They have traditionally lacked management skills.

Paul Theroux was sitting in the pew (at Bruce Chatwin's memorial service) behind him. "I suppose we'll be here for you next week, Salman," he said.

In a novel, if you're any good, you don't just have good people or bad people. You have complicated people. You have real people.

Unless, of course, there's no such thing as chance; ... in which case, we should either-optimistically-get up and cheer, because if everything is planned in advance, then we all have a meaning and are spared the terror of knowing ourselves to be random, without a why; or else, of course, we might-as pessimists-give up right here and now, understanding the futility of thought decision action, since nothing we think makes any difference anyway, things will be as they will. Where, then, is optimism? In fate or in chaos?

We were all trapped in stories, she said, just as he used to say, his wavy hair, his naughty smile, his beautiful mind, each of us the prisoner of our own solipsistic narrative, each family the captive of the family story, each community locked within its own tale of itself, each people the victims of their own versions of history, and there were parts of the world where the narratives collided and went to war, where there were two or more incompatible stories fighting for space on, to speak, the same page.

The history of life was not the bumbling progress - the very English, middle-class progress - Victorian thought had wanted it to be, but violent, a thing of dramatic, cumulative transformations: in the old formulation, more revolution than evolution.

This is what I am not: I am not one thing. I contain multitudes.

I'm not a very big fan of 'Slumdog Millionaire.' I think it's visually brilliant. But I have problems with the story line. I find the storyline unconvincing.

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

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

I know that when people pull apart, they usually employ misunderstanding as a weapon, deliberately getting hold of the stick's wrong end, impaling themselves on its point in order to prove the perfidy of the other.

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

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

The ruthlessness of the godly invalidated their claims of virtue.

There are those of us who learn to live completely in the moment. For such people the Past vanishes and the future loses meaning. There is only the Present, which means that two of the three Aalim are surplus to requirements. And then there are those of us who are trapped in yesterdays, in the memory of a lost love, or a childhood home, or a dreadful crime. And some people live only for a better tomorrow; for them the past ceases to exist