Saad Salman Quotes

I said to my friend, "Why do you smoke (cigarettes)?"
He replied, "Because I like to put myself on the line for the welfare and safety of others."
I astonishingly said, "Sorry, I didn't get your point."
He replied, "I want a cigarette-free world. Therefore, I am trying my best to end all the cigarettes from the world. ~ Saad Salman

Sometimes in life, you have to take difficult steps and make tough decisions, in order to achieve something extraordinary. ~ Saad Salman

Don't underestimate your tears. They have the power to strengthen your commitment to your life's purpose and to direct you towards your goal. So, when you cry because of the people who mock or taunt you, be positive and make promises with yourself that you will prove them wrong. ~ Saad Salman

I collect my thoughts, I choose my words,
Whenever I decide to talk to you.

But...

I feel like a dumb, without a tongue,
Whenever I reach in front of you.

I wonder why it happens to me?
even when my feelings are genuine and true. ~ Saad Salman

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 ~ Salman Rushdie

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. ~ Salman Rushdie

While he was writing the novel he received an invitation from the American University in Cairo, asking him to come and talk to their students. They said they couldn't pay him much but they could, if he were interested, arrange for him to take a boat up the Nile for a few days in the company of one of their leading Egyptologists. To see the world of ancient Egypt was one of his great unfulfilled dreams and he wrote back quickly. "If I could just finish my novel and arrange to come after that, that would be best," he suggested. Then he finished the novel,and it was The Satanic Verses, and a trip to Egypt became impossible, and he had to accept that he might never see the Pyramids, or Memphis, or Luxor, or Thebes, or Abu Simbel. It was one of the many futures he would lose. ~ Salman Rushdie

An attack upon our ability to tell stories is not just censorship - it is a crime against our nature as human beings. ~ Salman Rushdie

What's a „culture"? Look it up. „A group of micro-organisms grown in a nutrient substance under controlled conditions". A squirm of germs on a glass slide is all, a laboratory experiment calling itself a society. Most of us wrigglers make do with life on the slide; we even agree to feel proud of that „culture". Like slaves voting for slavery or brains for lobotomy, we kneel down before the god of all moronic micro-organisms and pray to be homogenized or killed or engineered; we promise to obey. ~ Salman Rushdie

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

Iff replied that the Plentimaw Fishes were what he called 'hunger artists' - 'Because when they are hungry they swallow stories through every mouth, and in their innards miracles occur; a little bit of one story joins on to an idea from another, and hey presto, when they spew the stories out they are not the old tales but new ones. Nothing comes from nothing, Thieflet; no story comes from nowhere; new stories are born from old - it is the new combinations that make them new. ~ Salman Rushdie

Every time you finish a book, you have a terrible feeling that there's just never going to be another one. But fortunately, so far, the next one has always shown up. ~ Salman Rushdie

It is often said by religious people that without its framework, there is no sense of right or wrong. My view is that religion comes after ethics. ~ Salman Rushdie

This is how we are: we fall in love with each other's strengths, but love deepens towards permanence when we fall in love with each other's weaknesses. ~ Salman Rushdie

The miniatures of the Mughal period are really the pinnacle of Indian artistic achievement. And not a single one of those paintings is done by an individual artist. ~ Salman Rushdie

What had been (at the beginning) no bigger than a full stop had expanded into a comma, a word, a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter; now it was bursting into more complex developments, becoming, one might say, a book - perhaps an encylopaedia - even a whole language ... ~ Salman Rushdie

The sixty-minute drama form has become very rich. ~ Salman Rushdie

I get a lot of letters - a lot of letters saying, who knew that you were funny? ~ Salman Rushdie

Little rich boy, that's all just wind. All that importance-of-the-individual. All that possibility-of-humanity. Today, what people are is just another kind of thing. ~ Salman Rushdie

The West was involved in toppling the Mossadegh government. That ultimately led to the Iranian revolution. ~ Salman Rushdie

When I was writing 'The Satanic Verses,' if you had asked me about the phenomenon that we all now know as radical Islam, I wouldn't have had much to say. As recently as the mid-1980s, it didn't seem to be a big deal. ~ Salman Rushdie

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. ~ Salman Rushdie

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

He wanted, for example, to investigate why one should hold fast to a religion not because it was true but because it was the faith of one's fathers. Was faith not faith but simple family habit? Maybe there was no true religion but only this eternal handing down. And error could be handed down as easily as virtue. Was faith no more than an error of our ancestors? ~ Salman Rushdie

Which she had spent long and happy hours releasing from their shells, with crazy dedication, because the shelling of pine-kernels is a form of lunacy, you spend more energy getting the damn things out than they give you when you eat. ~ Salman Rushdie

We who have grown up on a diet of honour and shame can still grasp what must seem unthinkable to people living in the aftermath of the death of God and of tragedy: that men will sacrifice their dearest love on the implacable altars of their pride. ~ Salman Rushdie

You cannot call yourself patient until you are willing and able to bear things that you have no wish to bear. ~ Salman Al-Ouda

Madame Bovary and a flying carpet, they are both untrue in the same way. Somebody made them up. ~ Salman Rushdie

To live in Metropolis was to know that the exceptional was as commonplace as diet soda, that abnormality was the popcorn norm. ~ Salman Rushdie

I, however, was raised neither as Catholic nor as Jew. I was both, and nothing: a jewholic-anonymous, a cathjew nut, a stewpot, a mongrel cur. I was
what's the word these days?
atomised. Yessir: a real Bombay mix. ~ Salman Rushdie

Why is that fairy-tales always treat marriage as an ending? And always such a perfectly happy one? ~ Salman Rushdie

What would a respectful political cartoon look like? ~ Salman Rushdie

The rich are obscure to us, finding ways to be unhappy when all the normal causes of unhappiness are removed. ~ Salman Rushdie

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 and of the heart. ~ Salman Rushdie

I grew up in a family in which there was very little religion. My father wasn't religious at all. But he was really interested in the subject of, you know, the birth and growth of Islam. And he basically transmitted that interest to me. ~ Salman Rushdie

There is nothing intrinsic linking any religion with any act of violence. The crusades don't prove that Christianity was violent. The Inquisition doesn't prove that Christianity tortures people. But that Christianity did torture people. ~ Salman Rushdie

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

When you've fallen from the sky, been abandoned by your friend, suffered police brutality, metamorphosed into a goat, lost your work as well as your wife, learned the power of hatred and regained human shape, what is there left to do but, as you would no doubt phrase it, demand your rights? ~ Salman Rushdie

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

The Fire Bug flared up at that. "You want to know what bugs me?" it said indignantly. "Nobodaddy's friendly about fire. Oh, it's fine in its place, people say, it makes a nice glow in a room, but keep an eye on it in case it gets out of control, and always put it out before you leave. Never mind how much it's needed; a few forests burned by wildfires, the occasional volcanic eruption, and there goes our reputation. Water, on the other hand! - hah! - there's no limit to the praise Water gets. Floods, rains, burst pipes, they make no difference. Water is everyone's favorite. And when they call it the Fountain of Life! - bah! - well, that just bugs me to bits." The Fire Bug dissolved briefly into a little cloud of angry, buzzing sparks, then came together again. "Fountain of Life, indeed," it hissed. "What an idea. Life is not a drip. Life is a flame. What do you imagine the sun is made of? Raindrops? I don't think so. Life is not wet, young man. Life burns. ~ Salman Rushdie

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

Free-form games in which the player can make choices about what the game is going to be, become a kind of gaming equivalent of the narrative possibility. ~ Salman Rushdie

Never make love to a woman who is bad with stained glass," the emperor said solemnly, giving no indication of humorous intent. "Such a woman is an ignorant shrew. ~ Salman Rushdie

Life has vanquished death and even the furniture celebrates. ~ Salman Rushdie

O Allah! If I cannot always understand Your wisdom in what You decree, please let me at least have the insight to accept it and be content with it. ~ Salman Al-Ouda

The thing I really like about Twitter is the speed with which information reaches me. You find out things from Twitter long before they're on the news. That, I think, is valuable. ~ Salman Rushdie

I want more than what I want. (Vina Apsara) ~ Salman Rushdie

Keeping silence doesn't show the weakness! It shows the patience to forgive. ~ Salman Aziz

A little bird whispers in my ear: Be fair! Nobody, no country, has a monopoly of untruth. ~ Salman Rushdie

Sometimes great, banned works defy the censor's description and impose themselves on the world - 'Ulysses,' 'Lolita,' the 'Arabian Nights.' ~ Salman Rushdie

To be born again,' sang Gibreal Farishta tumbling from the heaveans, 'first you have to die. Ho ji! Ho ji! To land upon the bosomy earth, first one needs to fly Tat-taa! Takatun! How to ever smile again, if first you won't cry? How to win the darling's love mister, without a sigh? ~ Salman Rushdie