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Salman Rushdie
56 quotes
“It matters, it always matters, to name rubbish as rubbish ... to do otherwise is to legitimize it.”
Salman Rushdie (born 1947) first seen 1984 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Outside The Whale" in Granta (1984)
“God, Satan, Paradise, and Hell all vanished one day in my fifteenth year, when I quite abruptly lost my faith. ... and afterwards, to prove my new-found atheism, I bought myself a rather tasteless ham sandwich, and so partook for the first time of the forbidden flesh of the swine. No thunderbolt arrived to strike me down. ... From that day to this I have thought of myself as a wholly secular person.”
Salman Rushdie (born 1947) first seen 1985 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: In God We Trust" (1985)
“It is a funny view of the world that a book can cause riots.”
Salman Rushdie (born 1947) first seen 1988 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: (When asked if he apprehended riots) Interview with Shrabani Basu (September 1988), quoted in Elst, Koenraad (2001). Decolonizing the Hindu mind: Ideological development of Hindu revivalism\\. New Delhi: Rupa. p. 32
“The responsibility for violence lies with those who perpetrate it.”
Salman Rushdie (born 1947) first seen 1990 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: In Good Faith" (1990), p. 19
“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.”
Salman Rushdie (born 1947) first seen 1990 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Herbert Reade Memorial Lecture (6 February 1990)
“What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.”
Salman Rushdie (born 1947) first seen 1992 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Imaginary Homelands p. 391 (1992)
“I don't think there is a need for an entity like God in my life.”
Salman Rushdie (born 1947) first seen 1993 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Salman Rushdie — Talking with David Frost (1993)
“I do not envy people who think they have a complete explanation of the world, for the simple reason that they are obviously wrong.”
Salman Rushdie (born 1947) first seen 1993 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Salman Rushdie — Talking with David Frost (1993)
“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 of the heart.”
Salman Rushdie (born 1947) first seen 1995 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Hindu (26 February 1995)
“To make Gandhi appeal to the Western market, he had to be sanctified and turned into Christ – an odd fate for a crafty Gujarati lawyer – and the history of one of the century's greatest revolutions had to be mangled.”
Salman Rushdie (born 1947) first seen 1998 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Salman Rushdie, quoted in Patrick French - Liberty or Death : India's Journey to Independence and Division (1998)
“The only people who see the whole picture are the ones who step outside the frame.”
Salman Rushdie (born 1947) first seen 1999 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999)
“Children are the vessels into which adults pour their poison.”
Salman Rushdie (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Who what am I? My answer: I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I've gone which would not have happened if I had not come. Nor am I particularly exceptional in this matter; each "I", everyone of the now-six-hundred-million-plus of us, contains a similar multitude. I repeat for the last time: to understand me, you'll have to swallow a world.”
Salman Rushdie (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Salman Rushdie (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The world, somebody wrote, is the place we prove real by dying in it.”
Salman Rushdie (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I reluctantly concluded that there was no way for me to help bring into being the Muslim culture I'd dreamed of, the progressive, irreverent, skeptical, argumentative, playful and unafraid culture which is what I've always understood as freedom. Not me, not in this lifetime, no chance. Actually Existing Islam, which has all but deified its Prophet, a man who always fought passionately against such deification, which has supplanted a priest-free religion by a priest-ridden one, which makes literalism a weapon and redescription a crime, will never let the likes of me in.”
Salman Rushdie (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Ibn Rushd's ideas were silenced in their time. And throughout the Muslim world today, progressive ideas are in retreat. Actually Existing Islam reigns supreme, and just as the recently destroyed "Actually Existing Socialism" of the Soviet terror-state was horrifically unlike the utopia of peace and equality of which democratic socialists have dreamed, so also is Actually Existing Islam a force to which I have never given in, to which I cannot submit. There is a point beyond which conciliation looks like capitulation. I do not believe I passed that point, but others have thought otherwise.”
Salman Rushdie (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When I was growing up, everyone around me was fond of fooling around with words. It was certainly common in my family, but I think it is typical of Bombay, and maybe of India, that there is a sense of play in the way people use language. Most people in India are multilingual, and if you listen to the urban speech patterns there you'll find it's quite characteristic that a sentence will begin in one language, go through a second language and end in a third. It's the very playful, very natural result of juggling languages. You are always reaching for the most appropriate phrase.”
Salman Rushdie (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I've been worrying about God a little bit lately. It seems as if he's been lashing out, you know, destroying cities, annihilating places. 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. If you look at the people who love God now, you know, if I was God, I'd need to destroy something.”
Salman Rushdie (born 1947) first seen 2005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Real Time with Bill Maher TV show (7 October 2005)
“What kind of God is it who's upset by a cartoon in Danish?”
Salman Rushdie (born 1947) first seen 2006 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview with Bill Moyers, Bill Moyers on Faith & Reason (23 June 2006) - transcript
“There were six hundred thousand Indian troops in Kashmir but the pogrom of the pandits was not prevented, why was that. Three and a half lakhs of human beings arrived in Jammu as displaced persons and for many months the government did not provide shelters or relief or even register their names, why was that.”
Salman Rushdie (born 1947) first seen 2008 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Shalimar the Clown (2008), p. 296. Quoted in Sreyoshi Sarkar, "Shalimar the Clown and the Politics of “Worlding” the Kashmir Conflict", Commonwealth Essays and Studies, 39.1 | 2016.
“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.”
Salman Rushdie (born 1947) first seen 2008 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Times of India, ‘Don’t allow religious hooligans to dictate terms’ (16 January 2008)
“In an ideal world you could reunite the Pakistan-occupied part of Kashmir with the Indian-occupied part and restore the old borders. You could have both India and Pakistan agreeing to guarantee those borders, demilitarise the area, and to invest in it economically. In a sane world that would happen but we don't live in a sane world.”
Salman Rushdie (born 1947) first seen 2012 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quoted in "Sir Salman Rushdie: Pakistan on the road to tyranny", BBC News, 18 September 2012.
“'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. '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. '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.”
Salman Rushdie (born 1947) first seen 2015 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Statement in The Wall Street Journal, Salman Rushdie: "I Stand With Charlie Hebdo, as We All Must" (7 January 2015)
“It is clear that India has not behaved at all well in Kashmir; that the Indian military forces seem like, feel like and behave like an occupying army; that there are too many accusations of violence, rape, and murder for it all to be made up; and the Pakistani side has constantly exacerbated the situation by the use of jihadist groups, and by the funding of groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Muhammad and so on.”
Salman Rushdie (born 1947) first seen 2012 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quoted in "Sir Salman Rushdie: Pakistan on the road to tyranny", BBC News, 18 September 2012.
“I have to say it has been alarming to see publishers looking to bowdlerise the work of such people as Roald Dahl and Ian Fleming [...] The idea that James Bond could be made politically correct is almost comical. I think that has to be resisted. Books have to come to us from their time and be of their time, and if that's difficult to take, don’t read them. Read another book, but don't try and remake yesterday's work in the light of today's attitudes.”
Salman Rushdie (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The freedom to publish, of course, is also the freedom to read, the freedom to write what you want, to be able to choose what you want to read and not have it decided for you externally — and the freedom to publish books that ought to be published and sometimes are difficult to publish because of pressure from this or that group.”
Salman Rushdie (born 1947) first seen 2023 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speaking via video link from New York at the Freedom to Publish award at the British Book Awards (15 May 2023), as cited in "Salman Rushdie mocks 'comical' attempt to rewrite James Bond novels" The Times (16 May 2023)
“There is no right in the world not to be offended. That right simply doesn't exist. In a free society, an open society, people have strong opinions, and these opinions very often clash. In a democracy, we have to learn to deal with this. And this is true about novels, it's true about cartoons, it's true about all these products.”
Salman Rushdie (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A question I have often asked is, "What would an inoffensive political cartoon look like?" What would a respectful cartoon look like? The form requires disrespect and so if we are going to have in the world things like cartoons and satire, we just have to accept it as part of the price of freedom.”
Salman Rushdie (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The mistake of the West was to put the Sauds on the throne of Saudi Arabia and give them control of the world's oil fortune, which they then used to propagate Wahhabi Islam. This very minor extremist cult, Wahhabism, was suddenly propagated across the Muslim world through madrassas and has created generations now who are steeped in this harsher, more paranoid, more confrontational version of Islam.”
Salman Rushdie (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[On the period immediately after the Iranian fatwa when Rushdie was in hiding.] I really resist the idea of being dragged back to that period of time that you insist on bringing up.”
Salman Rushdie (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I'm not a geopolitical entity. I'm someone writing in a room.”
Salman Rushdie (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One of the benefits of being a writer, I think, is that if what you're doing for a living is examining your life, hopefully by the time you reach this advanced age, you understand something about yourself and why you think what you think. Of course, other writers go in different directions.”
Salman Rushdie (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I grew up in a very female world with three younger sisters, so I was always comfortable around women, which was one of the reasons I hated my boarding school [Rugby], because there were no girls or women there. I think a lot of men are scared of women, and if the women are competent, brilliant or self-assured, they become even scarier. But to me, that's enormously attractive. I can't dream of having as a friend, or anything else in my life, a woman who is not those things.”
Salman Rushdie (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[Is there more support for censorship now?] I don't know if there's more of it, but it's certainly more obvious. There's a youthful progressive movement, much of which is extremely valuable, but there does seem to be within it an acceptance that certain ideas should be suppressed, and I just think that's worrying. Wherever there has been censorship, the first people to suffer from it are underprivileged minorities. So if in the name of underprivileged minorities you wish to endorse a suppression of wrongthink, it's a slippery slope.”
Salman Rushdie (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I'll tell you quite truthfully that the great wound in my life [from then] is India, because of the way I and my work have been treated there”
Salman Rushdie (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[Rushdie was stabbed in August 2022, leading to life-changing injuries, by an admirer of Ayatollah Khomeini. His novel, Victory City, was about to be published.] I'm hoping that to some degree it might change the subject. I've always thought that my books are more interesting than my life [...] Unfortunately, the world appears to disagree.”
Salman Rushdie (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I'm going to tell you really truthfully, I'm not thinking about the long term [...] I'm thinking about little step by little step. I just think, Bop till you drop.”
Salman Rushdie (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I've got nothing else to do. I would like to have a second skill, but I don't. I always envied writers like Günter Grass, who had a second career as a visual artist. I thought how nice it must be to spend a day wrestling with words, and then get up and walk down the street to your art studio and become something completely else. I don't have that. So, all I can do is this. As long as there's a story that I think is worth giving my time to, then I will. When I have a book in my head, it's as if the rest of the world is in its correct shape.”
Salman Rushdie (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Just wondering if the Royal Society of Literature is "impartial" about attempted murder, @BernardineEvari? (Asking for a friend.)”
Salman Rushdie (born 1947) first seen 2024 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Tweet/X post (8 February 2024), as cited in "Salman Rushdie: Is writers’ society 'impartial' on attempted murder?", The Times (9 February 2024).
“It had been thirty-three and a half years since the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s notorious death order against me and all those involved in the publication of The Satanic Verses, and during those years, I confess, I had sometimes imagined my assassin rising up in some public forum or other and coming for me in just this way. So my first thought when I saw this murderous shape rushing toward me was: So it’s you. Here you are.”
Salman Rushdie (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Art is not a luxury. It stands at the essence of our humanity, and it asks for no special protection except the right to exist. It accepts argument, criticism, even rejection. It does not accept violence. And in the end, it outlasts those who oppress it. The poet Ovid was exiled by Augustus Caesar, but the poetry of Ovid has outlasted the Roman Empire. The poet Mandelstam's life was ruined by Joseph Stalin, but his poetry has outlasted the Soviet Union. The poet Lorca was murdered by the thugs of General Franco, but his art has outlasted the fascism of the Falange.”
Salman Rushdie (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nowadays, however, a powerful tribe of clerics has taken over Islam. These are the contemporary Thought Police. They have turned Muhammad into a perfect being, his life into a perfect life, his revelation into the unambiguous, clear event it originally was not. Powerful taboos have been erected. One may not discuss Muhammad as if he were human, with human virtues and weaknesses. One may not discuss the growth of Islam as a historical phenomenon, as an ideology born out of its time. These are the taboos against which The Satanic Verses has transgressed (these and one other; I also tried to write about the place of women in Islamic society, and in the Koran). It is for this breach of taboo that the novel is being anathematized, fulminated against, and set alight.”
Salman Rushdie (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The zealots also attack me by false analogy, comparing my book to pornography and demanding a ban on both. Many Islamic spokesmen have compared my work to anti-Semitism. But intellectual dissent is neither pornographic nor racist. I have tried to give a secular, humanist vision of the birth of a great world religion. For this, apparently, I should be tried under the Race Relations Act, or if not that perhaps the Public Order Act. Any old act will do. The justification is that I have "given offense." But the giving of offense cannot be a basis for censorship, or freedom of expression would perish instantly. And many of us who were revolted by the Bradford flames will feel that the offense done to our principles is at least as great as any offense caused to those who burned my book.”
Salman Rushdie (born 1947) first seen 1989 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Book Burning" The New York Review of Books (March 2, 1989)
“Those who oppose the novel most vociferously today are of the opinion that intermingling with a different culture will inevitably weaken and ruin their own. I am of the opposite opinion. The Satanic Verses celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs. It rejoices in mongrelization and fears the absolutism of the Pure. Melange, hotchpotch, a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the world. It is the great possibility that mass migration gives the world... The Satanic Verses is for change-by-fusion, change-by-conjoining. It is a love song to our mongrel selves.”
Salman Rushdie (born 1947) first seen 1992 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Imaginary Homelands (1992)
“It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity. Which seems to be self-evidently true; but I suggest that the writer who is out-of-country and even out-of-language may experience this loss in an intensified form. It is made more concrete for him by the physical fact of discontinuity, of his present being in a different place from his past, of his being "elsewhere"... human beings do not perceive things whole; we are not gods but wounded creatures, cracked lenses, capably only of fractured perceptions. Partial beings, in all the senses of that phrase. Meaning is a shaky edifice we build out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old films, small victories, people hated, people loved; perhaps it is because of our sense of what is the case is constructed from such inadequate materials that we defend it so fiercely, even to the death.”
Salman Rushdie (born 1947) first seen 1992 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Imaginary Homelands (1992)
“The fundamentalist seeks to bring down a great deal more than buildings. Such people are against, to offer just a brief list, freedom of speech, a multi-party political system, universal adult suffrage, accountable government, Jews, homosexuals, women's rights, pluralism, secularism, short skits, dancing, beardlessness, evolution theory, sex. There are tyrants, not Muslims. United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan has said that we should now define ourselves not only by what we are for but by what we are against. I would reverse that proposition, because in the present instance what we are against is a no brainer. Suicidist assassins ram wide-bodied aircraft into the World Trade Center and Pentagon and kill thousands of people: um, I'm against that. But what are we for? What will we risk our lives to defend? Can we unanimously concur that all the items in the preceding list — yes, even the short skirts and the dancing — are worth dying for? The fundamentalist believes that we believe in nothing. In his world-view, he has his absolute certainties, while we are sunk in sybaritic indulgences. To prove him wrong, we must first know that he is wrong. We must agree on what matters: kissing in public places, bacon sandwiches, disagreement, cutting-edge fashion, literature, generosity, water, a more equitable distribution of the world's resources, movies, music, freedom of thought, beauty, love. These will be our weapons. Not by making war but by the unafraid way we choose to live shall we defeat them. How to defeat terrorism? Don't be terrorized. Don't let fear rule your life. Even if you are scared.”
Salman Rushdie (born 1947) first seen 1992 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Step Across This Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992–2002
“For many people, I've ceased to be a human being. I've become an issue, a bother, an "affair." ... And has it really been so long since religions persecuted people, burning them as heretics, drowning them as witches, that you can't recognize religious persecution when you see it? ... What is my single life worth? Despair whispers in my ear: "Not a lot." But I refuse to give in to despair ... because ... I know that many people do care, and are appalled by the ... upside-down logic of the post-fatwa world, in which a ... novelist can be accused of having savaged or "mugged" a whole community, becoming its tormentor (instead of its ... victim) and the scapegoat for ... its discontents... . (What minority is smaller and weaker than a minority of one?)”
Salman Rushdie (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I determined to make my peace with Islam, even at the cost of my pride. Those who were surprised and displeased by what I did perhaps failed to see that ... I wanted to make peace between the warring halves of the world, which were also the warring halves of my soul... . The really important conversations I had in this period were with myself. I said: Salman, you must send a message loud enough to ... make ordinary Muslims see that you aren't their enemy, and you must make the West understand a little more of the complexity of Muslim culture ..., and start thinking a little less stereotypically... . And I said to myself: Admit it, Salman, the Story of Islam has a deeper meaning for you than any of the other grand narratives. Of course you're no mystic, mister... . No supernaturalism, no literalist orthodoxies ... for you. But Islam doesn't have to mean blind faith. It can mean what it always meant in your family, a culture, a civilization, as open-minded as your grandfather was, as delightedly disputatious as your father was. ... Don't let the zealots make Muslim a terrifying word, I urged myself; remember when it meant family. ... I reminded myself that I had always argued that it was necessary to develop the nascent concept of the "secular Muslim," who, like the secular Jew, affirmed his membership of the culture while being separate from the theology... . But, Salman, I told myself, you can't argue from outside the debating chamber. You've got to cross the threshold, go inside the room, and then fight for your humanized, historicized, secularized way of being a Muslim.”
Salman Rushdie (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Too many people had spent too long demonizing or totemizing me to listen seriously to what I had to say. In the West, some "friends" turned against me, calling me by yet another set of insulting names. Now I was spineless, pathetic, debased; I had betrayed myself, my Cause; above all, I had betrayed them . I also found myself up against the granite, heartless certainties of Actually Existing Islam, by which I mean the political and priestly power structure that presently dominates and stifles Muslim societies. Actually Existing Islam has failed to create a free society anywhere on Earth, and it wasn't about to let me, of all people, argue in favor of one.”
Salman Rushdie (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source