100+ Salman Rushdie Quotes | InspiringQuotes.us

source: - "Salman Rushdie: Do we have to fight the battle for the Enlightenment all over again?" by Salman Rushdie, www.independent.co.uk. January 22, 2005.

Topics: Ideas, Criticism, Impossible, Derision, Freedom Of Thought

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.

Topics: World, Lines, Way

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

Topics: Names, Rubbish, Matter

I think the business of writing a great deal of it is the business of paying attention to your characters, to the world they live in, to the story you have to tell, but just a kind of deep attention and out of that if you pay attention properly the story will tell you what it needs.

Topics: Character, Writing, Thinking

Cruelty is not a literary value.

Topics: Cruelty, Values

Discovery is fun. I am incredibly open to everything.

Topics: Fun, Discovery

What kind of idea are you? Are you the kind that compromises, does deals, accomodates itself to society, aims to find a niche, to survive; or are you the cussed, bloody-minded, ramrod-backed type of damnfool notion that would rather break than sway with the breeze? â€“ The kind that will almost certainly, ninety-nine times out of hundred, be smashed to bits; but, the hundredth time, will change the world.

Topics: Life, Ideas, World

Between the adored and the adorer falls the shadow.

Topics: Fall, Shadow

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.

Topics: Giving, Alternatives, Stories, Gaming

Five mysteries hold the keys to the unseen: the act of love, and the birth of a baby, and the contemplation of great art, and being in the presence of death or disaster, and hearing the human voice lifted in song.

Topics: Song, Baby, Art, Human Voice

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.

Topics: Real, Mean, People, Magic Realism

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.

Topics: Atheist, Ideas, Religion

I think people direct good films when they feel personal to them, not because it's a famous book or something. It has to something move over that and somehow become personal to the director.

Topics: Moving, Book, Thinking, Good Films, Famous Book

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

Topics: Photography, Taken, Decision, Moral Decisions

When you write you in a way write out of what you think of as your best self, the part of you that is lacking in foibles and weaknesses and egotism and vanities and so on. You're just trying to really say something as truthful as you can out of the best that you have in you.

Topics: Writing, Thinking, Vanity, Foibles

When a reader falls in love with a book, it leaves its essence inside him, like radioactive fallout in an arable field, and after that there are certain crops that will no longer grow in him, while other, stranger, more fantastic growths may occasionally be produced.

Topics: Falling In Love, Book, Essence, Fallouts

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.

Topics: Children, Eye, Intelligent, Supple, Lateral Thinking

Memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else's version more than his own.

Topics: Memories, Reality, Special, Vilify

Our lives disconnect and reconnect, we move on, and later we may again touch one another, again bounce away. This is the felt shape of a human life, neither simply linear nor wholly disjunctive nor endlessly bifurcating, but rather this bouncey-castle sequence of bumpings-into and tumblings-apart.

Topics: Moving, Shapes, May, Tumbling

My heart broke open and history fell in.

Topics: Heart, My Heart, Broke

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...

Topics: Book, Development, Might

Reality is a question of perspective;

Topics: Reality, Perspective

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.

Topics: Thinking, Balance, Achieve

faith without doubt is addiction

Topics: Addiction, Doubt

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

source: - Independent, February 18, 1989.

Topics: Atheism, Woody, Positive Atheism

When you write, you write out of your best self. Everything else drops away.

Topics: Writing, Self

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.

Topics: People, Speech, Problem, Outrageous

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

Topics: Book, Writing, Beer, Inspiring Book, Books And Reading

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.

Topics: Dust, Names, Sound, Etymology, Naming Things

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.

Topics: Acceptance, Reality, Air

Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.

Topics: Book, Writing, Creation, Rushdie

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

Topics: Book, Easy, Offended, Offended You

What kind of Christmas present would Jesus ask Santa for?

Topics: Christmas, Jesus, Santa, Christmas Present

perhaps, if one wishes to remain an individual in the midst of the teeming multitudes, one must make oneself grotesque.

Topics: Wish, Conformity, Individualism

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

Topics: Safety, Effort, Trying, Take A Deep Breath

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

Topics: Rocks, Rock And Roll, People, Defense Mechanisms, Rock And Roll Music

Religion, a mediaeval form of unreason, when combined with modern weaponry becomes a real threat to our freedoms.

Topics: Real, Modern, Weaponry

Good advice is rarer than rubies.

source: - Salman Rushdie (2014). “East, West: Stories”, p.159, Vintage

Topics: Advice, Rubies, Good Advice

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.

Topics: Time, Past, Reality

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

Topics: History, World, Quiet

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

Topics: World, Breathe, Sigh, Inhale

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

Topics: Religious, Freedom Of Speech, Constitution, Limiting Freedom Of Expression

We all owe death a life.

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.

Topics: Heart, Imagination, Literature

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.

Topics: Dream, Air, Vision, Elba

Our human tragedy is that we are unable to comprehend our experience, it slips through our fingers, we can't hold on to it, and the more time passes, the harder it gets...My father said that the natural world gave us explanations to compensate for the meanings we could not grasp. The slant of the cold sunlight on a winter pine, the music of water, an oar cutting the lake and the flight of birds, the mountains' nobility , the silence of the silence. We are given life but must accept that it is unattainable and rejoice in what can be held in the eye, the memory, the mind.

Topics: Memories, Father, Eye, Oar, Given Life

When you throw everything up in the air anything becomes possible.

Topics: Air, Up In The Air

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

Topics: Stories, Individual, Discrete

Not all possibilities are open to us. The world is finite; our hopes spill over its rim.

Topics: World, Possibility, Finite, Rims

Freedom to reject is the only freedom.

Topics: Rejects

If the creative artist worries if he will still be free tomorrow, then he will not be free today.

Topics: Artist, Worry, Creative

The lessons one learns at school are not always the ones the school thinks it's teaching.

Topics: Teaching, School, Thinking

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.

Topics: Voice, Talking, Literature, Absolute Freedom, Goodman

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.

Topics: Knowing, Important, Stories

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.

Topics: People, Violence, Christianity

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.

Topics: People, Atheism, Society, Friction

Now I know what a ghost is. Unfinished business, that's what.

Topics: Ghost, Unfinished, Unfinished Business

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.

Topics: Men, World, Lost, Lost In Translation

Whenever someone who knows you disappears, you lose one version of yourself. Yourself as you were seen, as you were judged to be. Lover or enemy, mother or friend, those who know us construct us, and their several knowings slant the different facets of our characters like diamond-cutter's tools. Each such loss is a step leading to the grave, where all versions blend and end.

Topics: Mother, Character, Loss, People In Your Life, Essayists

From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable.

Topics: Men, Used, Justify, Zealotry

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.

Topics: Doing What You Want, Want, Censorship

But love is what we want, not freedom. Who then is the unluckier man? The beloved, who is given his heart's desire and must for ever after fear its loss, or the free man, with his unlooked-for liberty, naked and alone between the captive armies of the earth?

Topics: Heart, Loss, Army, Free Man

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.

Topics: Inspirational, Life, Ideas

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.

Topics: Thinking, Stories, New Thought, Power Of Stories

Laila Lalami has fashioned an absorbing story of one of the first encounters between Spanish conquistadores and Native Americans, a frightening, brutal, and much-falsified history that here, in her brilliantly imagined fiction, is rewritten to give us something that feels very like the truth.

Topics: Native American, Giving, Fiction, Absorbing

What's the use of stories that aren't even true?

Topics: Stories, Use

Masks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull.

Topics: Honesty, Skulls, Mask

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.

Topics: God, Long, Important

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

Topics: Book, Events, Publishing

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.

Topics: Heart, Earthquakes, Return

Everest silences you...when you come down, nothing seems worth saying, nothing at all. You find the nothingness wrapping you up, like a sound. Non-being. You can't keep it up, of course. the world rushes in soon enough. What shuts you up is, I think, the sight you've had of perfection: why speak if you can't manage perfect thoughts, perfect sentences? It feels like a betrayal of what you've been through. But it fades; you accept that certain compromises, closures, are required if you're to continue.

Topics: Betrayal, Thinking, Sight

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.

Topics: Life Is Good, People, Excess

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

Topics: Life, Children, World

A book is not completed till it's read.

Topics: Book

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

Topics: Judging, Size, Injury

Something was badly amiss with the spiritual life of the planet...Too many demons inside people claiming to believe in God.

Topics: Spiritual, Believe, People

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

Topics: Atheist, Religion

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.)

Topics: Feet, People, Triangles, Whole Picture

We crave permission openly to become our secret selves.

Topics: Self, Secret, Permission, Crave

Vertigo is the conflict between the fear of falling and the desire to fall.

Topics: Fall, Desire, Conflict, Vertigo

Our lives teach us who we are.

Topics: Character, Who We Are, Human Nature, Life Teaches

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.

Topics: Dream, Stars, Writing

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.

Topics: Years, Atheism, One Day, Swine, Thunderbolts

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

Topics: Being Alone, Solitude, Rooms, Seclusion

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

Topics: Artist, Imagination, Firsts, Great Artist

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.

Topics: Courage, Sleep, Names, Going To Sleep, Poetry By Poets

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.

Topics: Real, Dust, Water

Human beings understand themselves and shape their futures by arguing and challenging and questioning and saying the un-sayable, not by bowing the knee whether to gods or to men.

Topics: Men, Challenges, Shapes

Perhaps the story you finish is never the one you begin.

Topics: Stories

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

Topics: Pain, Thinking, Action

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.

Topics: Art, Lying, Self, Literary Art, Self Censorship

Many of us didn't believe in the image of bin Laden as a wandering Old Man of the Mountains, living on plants and insects in an inhospitable cave somewhere on the porous Pakistan-Afghan border.

Topics: Believe, Men, Mountain, Afghan

Like everybody else, I've had relationships in which I was passionately in love but was completely miserable all the time and didn't trust the person I was in love with one inch.

Topics: Miserable, Inches, Persons

It's one thing to say, 'I don't like what you said to me and I find it rude and offensive,' but the moment you threaten violence in return, you've taken it to another level, where you lose whatever credibility you had.

Topics: Taken, Rude, Levels

Islam is unusual in that it's the only one of the great world religions which was born inside recorded history. That there's an enormous amount of factual historical record about the life of a prophet and about social conditions in Arabia at that time. So it's possible to look at the origin of Islam in a scholarly way.

source: - Source: www.pbs.org

Topics: Historical, Islam, Looks, World Religions, Social Conditions

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.

Topics: Writing, Thinking, Typewriters, Bombay, Satanic Verses

Matthew Wiener on 'Mad Men' writes the entire series before they start shooting, and if you have that, then what you can do with character and story is not at all unlike what you can do in a novel.

Topics: Character, Writing, Men

Most American writers don't get asked their opinion on current affairs, whereas in Europe and England, we still do. There are writers here who are the most sophisticated commentators, but they're not asked. Like Don DeLillo, who sort of forecast most of the modern world before it happened.

Topics: Europe, World, England, Current Affairs, American Writer

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

Topics: Journey, Long, Mumbai, Syllabus, Long Journey

Perhaps because my relationship with my father went through such a long, bumpy time, it's been very important for me to work to try to keep lines of communication open between my sons and myself to try to avoid my father's mistakes. At least if you're making mistakes, make different mistakes.

Topics: Mistake, Father, Communication, Lines Of Communication

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.

Topics: Ideas, People, Done

Pakistan is alarmed by the rising Indian influence in Afghanistan, and fears that an Afghanistan cleansed of the Taliban would be an Indian client state, thus sandwiching Pakistan between two hostile countries. The paranoia of Pakistan about India's supposed dark machinations should never be underestimated.

Topics: Country, Dark, Two, India And Pakistan

Out-of-step intellectuals like Noam Chomsky and the deceased Edward Said have often been dismissed as crazy extremists, 'anti-American,' and in Mr. Said's case even, absurdly, as apologists for Palestinian 'terrorism.'

Topics: Crazy, Steps, Terrorism, Anti-american

One of the things I've learnt is not to depend on there being a woman in your life to make it work. I love my work, I love my children, I've got wonderful friends, you know, I have a nice life.

Topics: Children, Nice, Wonderful, I Love My Children, Wonderful Friends

One of the things I do take some pride in is that if you had never read an article about my life, if you knew nothing about me, except that my books were being set in front of you to read, and if you were to read those books in sequence, I don't think you would say to yourself, 'Oh my God, something terrible happened to this writer in 1989.'

Topics: Book, Pride, Thinking

One of the reasons my name is Rushdie is that my father was an admirer of Ibn Rush'd, the 12th century Arab philosopher known as Averroes in the West. In his time, he was making the non-literalist case for interpreting the Koran.

Topics: Father, Names, West, Rushdie

My first novel - the novel I wrote before 'Midnight's Children' - feels, to me, now, very - I mean, I get embarrassed when I see people reading it. You know, there are some people who, bizarrely, like it. Which I'm, you know, I'm happy for.

Topics: Children, Reading, Mean

In early Islam, it was an absolute tenet that the prophet was not to be worshipped. The prophet was a messenger. And one of the things that's happened in Islam is this cult of the prophet, which to my view is counter to the original tradition.

Topics: Views, Islam, Messengers

In any authoritarian society, the possessor of power dictates, and if you try and step outside, he will come after you. This is equally true of Sovietism, of China and of Iran, and in our time it has happened a lot in Islam. The point is that it's worse when the authoritarianism is supported by something supernatural.

Topics: Iran, Trying, Islam, Authoritarianism

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.

Topics: Thinking, Stories, Lines, Storyline, Slumdog Millionaire

I'm a reader of Chinese literature, I like their films, but also: I've had great difficulty getting my work published in China; very little of it has been published there. The first two attempts to have all of my work published, for instance, were refused without any reason ever being given.

Topics: Two, Chinese, Literature

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.

Topics: Desire, Needs, Answers

I was very happy in Bombay. I was good at school. There was no reason to change anything. I suppose it must have been some spirit of adventure, of wanting to see the world.

Topics: School, Adventure, World, Spirit Of Adventure, Bombay

I was 21 in 1968, so I'm as much a child of the '60s as is possible to be. In those years the subject of religion had really almost disappeared; the idea that religion was going to be a major force in the life of our societies, in the West anyway, would have seemed absurd in 1968.

Topics: Children, Years, Ideas

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.

Topics: New York, Writing, Years, Syndicate

I think, in a written novel, the way in which you play with the readers' emotion or the way in which you engage the readers' emotions can be very indirect. You could come at it through irony or comedy, etcetera, and you could capture people's sympathies and feelings kind of by stealth if you like.

Topics: Thinking, Play, People, Etcetera, Stealth

I saw Quentin Tarantino's 'Django Unchained,' and you could say a lot of things against it, but it was incredible fun. I don't like blood and gore, and I am very squeamish about violence, but Tarantino's violence is actually funny.

Topics: Fun, Blood, Django, Tarantino, Quentin

Raif Badawi's is an important voice for all of us to hear.

Topics: Voice, Important

I have had many more close women friends than men, and I've always assumed that comes from the fact that in my family there was such a disproportionate female element.

Topics: Men, Facts, Female

I've been fascinated by Machiavelli since I was very young. I've always felt that he had a bad rap from history, and that he was actually a person quite unlike what we now think of as Machiavellian. He was a republican. He disliked totalitarian government.

Topics: Rap, Thinking, Government, Totalitarian Government

I've met the Dalai Lama briefly, but I would probably say my grandfather was the wisest person I ever met. He was my mother's father, an Indian, a family doctor, and very unlike me in that he was deeply religious.

Topics: Mother, Religious, Father, Dalai

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.

Topics: Borders, Pakistan, Guarantees, Kashmir, India And Pakistan

If there were Israeli attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities, it makes it certain there would be a reprisal attack against the United States at some point.

Topics: Nuclear, United States, Would Be, Israeli, Reprisal

If you're on a freeway and want to know if you're being followed, what you do is enormously vary your speed. You accelerate to 100 and slow down to 30 and then accelerate again. In a city, you make a lot of turns against the stream of traffic. You go around a roundabout twice.

Topics: Cities, Want, Speed

If you look at Indian movies, every time they wanted an exotic locale, they would have a dance number in Kashmir. Kashmir was India's fairyland. Indians went there because in a hot country you go to a cold place. People would be entranced by the sight of snow.

Topics: Country, Sight, Numbers, Kashmir

If you live in free countries, you don't have to spend all your life arguing about freedom because it is all around you. It seems redundant to make a lot of noise about something when, in fact, there it is. But if someone tries to remove it, it becomes important for you to formulate your own defenses of it.

Topics: Country, Important, Trying, Redundant

If the culture shifts, if people think differently about women, the art will shift, too. You can't ask art to make social change. It's not what it's for.

Topics: Art, Thinking, People

If terrorism is to be defeated, the world of Islam must take on board the secularist-humanist principles on which the modern is based, and without which Muslim countries' freedom will remain a distant dream.

Topics: Dream, Country, Islam

If I were dead, then nobody in England would have to fuss about the cost of my security and whether or not I merited such special treatment for so long.

Topics: Long, Special, Cost, Special Treatment

If I had simply wanted to trade on an insult to Islam, I could have done it in a sentence rather than writing a 250,000-word novel, a work of fiction.

Topics: Writing, Islam, Fiction

I've never seen anywhere in the world as beautiful as Kashmir. It has something to do with the fact that the valley is very small and the mountains are very big, so you have this miniature countryside surrounded by the Himalayas, and it's just spectacular. And it's true, the people are very beautiful too.

Topics: Beautiful, People, Mountain, Kashmir, Countryside

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?

Topics: Book, Writing, Years

Literature is the one place in any society where, within the secrecy of our own heads, we can hear voices talking about everythingin every possible way. The reason for ensuring that that privileged arena is preserved is not that writers want the absolute freedom to say and do whatever they please. It is that we, all of us, readers and writers and citizens and generals and goodmen, need that little, unimportant-looking room. We do not need to call it sacred, but we do need to remember that it is necessary.

Topics: Talking, Voice, Citizens

Where there is no belief, there is no blasphemy.

Topics: Belief, Blasphemy

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.

Topics: Air, Down And, Different

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.

Topics: Stories, Combination, Born

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.

Topics: Lying, Errors, Work Out

I fell victim to the temptation of every autobiographer, to the illusion that since the past exists only in one's memories and the words which strive vainly to encapsulate them, it is possible to create past events simply by saying they occurred.

Topics: Memories, Past, Temptation, Past Events

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

Topics: Race, May, Different

I had become a kind of information magpie, gathering to myself all manner of shiny scraps of fact and hokum and books and art-history and politics and music and film, and developing, too, a certain skill in manipulating and arranging these pitiful shards so that they glittered and caught the light. Fool's gold, or priceless nuggets mined from my singular childhood's rich bohemian seam? I leave it to others to decide.

Topics: Art, Book, Light, Magpies, Pitiful

If a birth is the fall-out from the explosion caused by the union of two unstable elements, then perhaps a half-life is all we can expect.

Topics: Fall, Two, Elements, Half Life

Abraham Zogoiby covered his face that night in August 1939 because he had been assailed by fear, [...] a sudden apprehension that the ugliness of life might defeat its beauty; that love did not make lovers invulnerable. Nevertheless, he thought, even if the world's beauty and love were on the edge of destruction, theirs would still be the only side to be on; defeated love would still be love, hate's victory would not make it other than it was.

Topics: Hate, Night, August, Beauty And Love

Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can't forgive.

Topics: Writing, People, Forgiving, Can't Forgive

How to forgive the world for its beauty, which merely disguises its ugliness; for its gentleness, which merely cloaks its cruelty; for its illusion of continuity, seamlessly, as the night follows the day, so to speak- whereas in reality life is a series of brutal raptures, falling upon your defenseless hands, like the blows of a woodman's axe?

Topics: Life, Fall, Blow, How To Forgive

In the end, you write the book that grabs you by the throat and demands to be written.

Topics: Book, Writing, Demand

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

Topics: Real

My love for Dan Brown knows no bounds. It literally has no mass.

Topics: Brown, Mass

Freedom is not a tea party, India. Freedom is a war.

Topics: War, Party, Tea, Tea Party

Question: What is the opposite of faith? Not disbelief. Too final, certain, closed. Itself is a kind of belief. Doubt.

Topics: Opposites, Doubt, Finals

Sometimes, people trying to commit suicide manage it in a manner that leaves them breathless with astonishment.

Topics: Suicide, People, Trying

What you were is forever who you are.

Topics: Forever, Who You Are

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.

Topics: Two, Fables, India

I have been only the humblest jugglers-with-facts; and that, in a country where the truth is what it is instructed to be, reality quite literally ceases to exist, so that everything becomes possible except what we are told is the case; and maybe this was the difference between my Indian childhood and Pakistani adolescence--that in the first I was beset by an infinity of alternative realities, while in the second I was adrift, disoriented, amid an equally infinite number of falsenesses, unrealities and lies.

Topics: Country, Lying, Reality, Jugglers, Falseness

The inevitable triumph of illusion over reality that was the single most obvious truth about the history of the human race.

Topics: Reality, Race, Triumph

My parents gave me the gift of irreligion, of growing up without bothering to ask people what gods they held dear, assuming that in fact, like my parents, they weren't interested in gods, and that this uninterest was 'normal.' You may argue that the gift was a poisoned chalice, but even if so, that's a cup from which I'd happily drink again.

Topics: Growing Up, People, Parent, Irreligion, Chalice

Because I've always felt, whether the fatwa or whatever, the writer's great weapon is the truth and integrity of his voice. And as long as what you're saying is what you truly, honestly believe to be the case, then whatever the consequences, that's fine. That's an honorable position.

Topics: Truth, Integrity, Believe

I've never read anything so badly written that got published. It made 'Twilight' look like 'War and Peace.'

Topics: War, Twilight, Looks

No, I don't think it's fair to label Islam 'violent.' But I will say that to my knowledge, no writer has ever gone into hiding for criticizing the Amish.

Topics: Thinking, Islam, Labels, Amish

The history of a culture can be determined by its untranslatable words.

Topics: Culture, Determined

Every Day Is for the Thief, by turns funny, mournful, and acerbic, offers a portrait of Nigeria in which anger, perhaps the most natural response to the often lamentable state of affairs there, is somehow muted and deflected by the author's deep engagement with the country: a profoundly disenchanted love. Teju Cole is among the most gifted writers of his generation.

Topics: Country, Generations, Engagement, Nigeria, Disenchanted

My friend Lou Reed came to the end of his song. So very sad.But hey, Lou, you'll always take a walk on the wild side. Always a perfect day.

Topics: Song, Perfect, Hey, Wild Side, Perfect Days

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.

Topics: Intelligent, Games, Mets

The difference between memoir and autobiography, as far as I see it, is that a memoir is there primarily to tell one particular story, whereas an autobiography tries to be a full account of a life.

Topics: Differences, Trying, Stories

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.

Topics: Veils, Female, Three, Muslim Family, Three Sisters

The USA approach looks like bullying because it is.

Topics: Bullying, Iraq, Usa

Originality is dangerous. It challenges, questions, overturns assumptions, unsettles moral codes.

Topics: Challenges, Moral, Originality, Moral Code

If somebody's trying to shut you up, sing louder, and if possible, better.

source: - Salman Rushdie, Michael Reder (2000). “Conversations with Salman Rushdie”, p.227, Univ. Press of Mississippi

Topics: Trying

The real risks for any artist are taken in pushing the work to the limits of what is possible, in the attempt to increase the sum of what it is possible to think. Books become good when they go to this edge and risk falling over it -when they endanger the artist by reason of what he has, or has not, artistically dared.

Topics: Real, Book, Fall

As I look back, I feel a touch of pride at my younger self's dedication to literature, which gave him the strength of mind to resist the blandishments of the enemies of promise. The sirens of ad-land sang sweetly and seductively, but I thought of Odysseus lashing himself to the mast of his ship, and somehow stayed on course.

Topics: Pride, Dedication, Self, Strength Of Mind, Odysseus

optimism is a disease

Topics: Optimism, Disease

I grew up kissing books and bread.

Topics: Book, Reading, Kissing

He would dream of discovering a magic optometrist from whom he would purchase a pair of green-tinged spectacles which would correct his regrettable myopia, and after that he would be able to see through the dense, blinding air to the fabulous world beneath.

Topics: Dream, Air, Magic, Myopia

In the cookie of life, friends are the chocolate chips.

Topics: Chocolate, Cookies, Chips, Chocolate Chip Cookies, Chocolate Chips

Home is the place where you feel happy.

Topics: Home, Feels

I make no complaint. I am a writer. I do not accept my condition; I will strive to change it; but I inhabit it, I am trying to learn from it.

Topics: Trying, Strive, Accepting

Sometimes I think that when people become famous, there's a public perception that they are not human beings any more. They don't have feelings; they don't get hurt; you can act and say as you like about them.

Topics: Hurt, Thinking, People

I do think there was a period there when my sanity was under intense pressure, and I didn't know what to say or do or how to act. I was literally living from day to day.

Topics: Thinking, Pressure, Sanity

The glamour of being forbidden must not be underestimated.

Topics: Glamour, Forbidden, Underestimated

Such is the miraculous nature of the future of exiles: what is first uttered in the impotence of an overheated apartment becomes the fate of nations.

Topics: Nature, Fate, Firsts, Impotence

I will come back to India - so deal with it.

Topics: India, Deals

Sometimes you find your voice by trying to write like people, and sometimes you find it by trying to write unlike people.

Topics: Writing, Voice, People

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

Topics: Book, Reading, Writing

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