Salman Rushdie Quotes

“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.”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

“Everything has shape, if you look for it. There is no escape from form.”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

“He did not wish to be divine. If there had never been a God, the emperor thought, it might have been easier to work out what goodness was. This business of worship, of the abnegation of self in the face of the Almighty, was a distraction, a false trail. 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.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence

“If a hungry dog looks for food, he does not look in the doghouse.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

“On page 605, Blumenthal says that 'I made friends with Hitchens's friends the novelists Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie.' True in its way. I particularly remember the occasion when he called me up and invited me to dinner with Dick Morris, but only on condition that I brought Rushdie (who was staying in my house) along with me. No Rushdie: no invitation. So I never did get to meet Dick Morris.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“To take a side against Rushdie, or to be neutral and evasive about him in the name of some vaguely sensitive ecumenical conscience, is to stand against those who try to incubate a Reformation in the Muslim world.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“I am your handiwork made flesh. You took beauty and created hideousness, and out of this monstrosity your child will be born …. I am the meaning of your deeds. I am the meaning of your so-called love; your destructive, selfish, wanton love … your love looks just like hatred.”
― Salman Rushdie, Shalimar the Clown

“Ravings, in short, jealousy of the past, the worst kind of all.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

“She allowed history to leave her without trying to hold it back, the way children allow a grand parade to pass, holding it in their memory, making it an unforgettable thing, making it their own”
― Salman Rushdie, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

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

So if someone tells me I've written something that's historically inaccurate, I can just tell them, "Salman Rushdie said I could." :)”
― Veronica Bale

“...what a leveller this remote-control gizmo was...it chopped down the heavyweight and stretched out the slight until all the set's emissions, commercials, murders, game-shows, the thousand and one varying joys and terrors of the real and the imagined, acquired an equal weight...”
― Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

“..now, seated hunched over paper in a pool of Anglepoised light, I no longer want to be anything except what who I am. Who what am I? My answer: I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have 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', every one 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

“You are invited to my Nigga strata dream. Pizza and hot tomatoes.”
― Petra Hermans, Voor een betere wereld

“Hitchens saw that the attack on the Satanic Verses was not an isolated occurrence, that across the Muslim world, writers and journalists and artists were being accused of the same crimes: blasphemy, heresy, apostasy, and their modern-day associates, 'insult' and 'offence'. And he intuited that beyond this intellectual assault lay the possibility of an attack on a broader front. He quoted Heine to me: 'Where they burn books, they will afterwards burn people.' hitchens referred to me as an 'uppity wog' before.”
― Salman Rushdie, Languages of Truth: Essays 2003-2020

“Christopher came to believe that the people who understood the dangers posed by radical Islam were on the right, that his erstwhile comrades on the left were arranging with one another to miss what seemed to him like a pretty obvious point; and so, never one to do things by halves, he made what looked to many people like a U-turn”
― Salman Rushdie, Languages of Truth: Essays 2003-2020

“India was the first country to ban The Satanic Verses- which was proscribed without following India's own stipulated due process in such matters, banned before it entered the country by a weak Congress government led by Rajiv Gandhi, in a desperate, unsuccessful bid for Muslim votes.”
― Salman Rushdie, Step Across This Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992-2002

“People who have known Sonia for years urge me not to swallow the line that she was never interested in politics and only allowed herself to be drafted into the leadership because of her concern for the party. A portrait is painted of a woman completely seduced by power but unable to wield it, lacking the skill, charm, vision, indeed everything except the hunger for power itself.”
― Salman Rushdie, Step Across This Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992-2002