Salman Rushdie Quotes

But there's one thing we must all be clear about: terrorism is not the pursuit of legitimate goals by some sort of illegitimate means. Whatever the murderers may be trying to achieve, creating a better world certainly isn't one of their goals. Instead they are out to murder innocent people.

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.

I stand with Charlie Hebdo, as we all must, to defend the art of satire, which has always been a force for liberty and against tyranny, dishonesty and stupidity.

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.

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.

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.

People can do bad things with free speech as well as good. You have to defend the Ku Klux Klan as well as Martin Luther King. It's like that. If you're going to defend the principle, then you have to defend people who use the principle badly.

What I do think is evident is that those countries in the world where Islamic extremism has recovered the most power, those are also the countries which are most disliked.

I have never really thought of myself as a writer about religion. And I think one of the things that happened to me as a result of all that is that I think it did for some people, many people, obscure the kind of writer that I actually am.

Fundamentalists believe that we don't believe in anything. In their view of the world, they are in possession of absolute certainties, while we are descending into decadence. We will be able to triumph over terrorism not by waging war on it, but through a conscious, fearless way of life.

I have always thought that these two ways of talking, one is the fantastic, the fable, the fairy tale, and the other being history, the scholarly study of what happened, I think they're both amazing ways to understand human nature.

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.

I think if we wish to live in any kind of a moral universe, we must hold the perpetrators of violence responsible for the violence they perpetrate. It's very simple. The criminal is responsible for the crime.

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.

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

Stories in families are colossally important. Every family has stories: some funny, some proud, some embarrassing, some shameful. Knowing them is proof of belonging to the family.

Literature is the one place in any society where, within the secrecy of our own heads, we can hear voices talking about everything in every possible way.

Killing people because you don't like their ideas - it's a bad thing.

India is my kid sister.

Go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets. Take a deep breath before you begin.

I've never rejected the world I came from. To be rejected by it is horrible.

In the real world, immeasurable hurt is caused by terrorists based in Pakistan who attack countries like India.

The publishing of a book is a worldwide event. The attempt to suppress a book is a worldwide event.

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

If Woody Allen were a Muslim, he'd be dead by now.

What can't be cured must be endured.

This may be the curse of human race . Not that we are different from one anther , but we are so alike .

After a long, hopeless war, people will settle for peace, at almost any price.

A man who catches History's eye is thereafter bound to a mistress from whom he will never escape.

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

In television, the 60-minute series, 'The Wire' and 'Mad Men' and so on, the writer is the primary creative artist.

Bread and books: food for the body and food for the soul - what could be more worthy of our respect, and even love?

A mature society understands that at the heart of democracy is argument.

Freedom to reject is the only freedom.

When thought becomes excessively painful, action is the finest remedy.

A sigh isn't just a sigh. We inhale the world and breathe out meaning. While we can. While we can.

A novel, I think, is partly about the contemporary and partly about the eternal, and it's the balance of that that's difficult to achieve.

Good advice is rarer than rubies.

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

You can't judge an internal injury by the size of the hole.

There are things you break that can't be put back together again. And Kashmir may be one of them.

A photograph is a moral decision taken in one eighth of a second.

I grew up kissing books and bread.

If you're offended, it's your problem.

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

What one writer can make in the solitude of one room is something no power can easily destroy.

I didn't become a writer to write about me.

You can find shame in every house, burning in an ashtray, hanging framed upon a wall, covering a bed. But nobody notices it any more.

It seems that the right of freedom of speech that was enshrined in numerous constitutions is now under attack by religious institutions.

We were language's magpies by nature, stealing whatever sounded bright and shiny.

What kind of Christmas present would Jesus ask Santa for?

We all owe death a life.

The world, somebody wrote, is the place we prove real by dying in it.

Between the adored and the adorer falls the shadow.

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

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

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

I admit it: above all things, I fear absurdity.

What's real and what's true aren't necessarily the same.

To understand just one life you have to swallow the world ... do you wonder, then, that I was a heavy child?

He knew what he knew: that the real world was full of magic, so magical worlds could easily be real.

How do you defeat terrorism? Don’t be terrorized.

One of the things a writer is for is to say the unsayable, speak the unspeakable and ask difficult questions.

It is very, very easy not to be offended by a book. You just have to shut it.

Masks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull.

Once you put a thought into the world, it can be disagreed with, but it can't be unthought.

Where there is no belief, there is no blasphemy.

We are the storytelling animal.

Our lives, our stories, flowed into one another's, were no longer our own, individual, discrete.

Reality is a question of perspective.

For every snake, there is a ladder; for every ladder,a snake

The moment you declare a set of ideas to be immune from criticism, satire, derision, or contempt, freedom of thought becomes impossible.

Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.

Even when things are at their worst, there's a little voice in your head saying, 'Good story!'

I stand with Charlie Hebdo, as we all must, to defend the art of satire.

Free speech is not just free speech for people you admire. It's also for people who you think of as reprehensible.

It matters, it always matters, to name rubbish as rubbish; that to do otherwise is to legitimize it.

Religion, a mediaeval 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.

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.

Among the great struggles of man-good/evil, reason/unreason, etc.-there is also this mighty conflict between the fantasy of Home and the fantasy of Away, the dream of roots and the mirage of the journey.

I've been worrying about God a little bit lately... 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.

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.

‘Respect for religion’ has become a code phrase meaning ‘fear of religion.’ Religions, like all other ideas, deserve criticism, satire, and, yes, our fearless disrespect.

Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, power to retell it, to rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change, truly are powerless, because they cannot think new thoughts.

We have come to think of taking offence as a fundamental right. We value very little more highly than our rage, which gives us, in our opinion, the moral high ground. From there we can shoot down at our enemies and inflict heavy fatalities.

Speaking as somebody with three sisters and a very largely female Muslim family, there is not a single woman I know in my family or in their friends who would have accepted the wearing of a veil.

I only met Margaret Thatcher twice. The thing that I thought about meeting her was how extraordinarily intelligent she was. You really had to be on your game otherwise she'd make mincemeat of you.

People must be protected from prejudice against their person. But people cannot be protected from prejudice against their ideas - because otherwise we're all done.

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.

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.

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."

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.

Self-censorship is a lie to yourself; if you are going to be trying to seriously create art, to create literary art, and you decide to hold back, to censor yourself, then you are a fool to yourself and it would be better that you kept your mouth shut and did not speak.

I would argue that religion comes from a desire to get to the questions of, 'Where do we come from?' and 'How shall we live?' And I would say I don't need religion to answer those questions.

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.

You can adhere to your faith, but that faith needs to march in line with the rest of the world and needs to find a way of expressing itself in the modern world.

The only position when violence is threatened in response to a novel or a cartoon or a crappy YouTube video is a no-surrender position. This is how we live. We live in a country in which we have these rights, and we're not going to give them up. Full stop. The end.

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.

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 acceptance that all that is solid has melted into the air, that reality and morality are not givens but imperfect human constructs, is the point from which fiction begins.

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.

Censorship is the thing that stops you doing what you want to do, and what writers want to talk about is what they do, not what stops them doing it.

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.

Once you have been in an earthquake you know, even if you survive without a scratch, that like a stroke in the heart, it remains in the earth's breast, horribly potential, always promising to return, to hit you again, with an even more devastating force.

I used to say, 'There is a God-shaped hole in me.' For a long time I stressed the absence, the hole. Now I find it is the shape which has become more important.

One of the problems with defending free speech is you often have to defend people that you find to be outrageous and unpleasant and disgusting.

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.

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.