Salman Rushdie Quotes

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.

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

I don't think I've ever quite grown out of it, actually. There was a point where I could recite some of those Elvish verses - which I've mercifully forgotten. But I can still, if really pushed, recite the text of the inside of the ruling ring in the language of Mordor.

There is no such thing as perfect security, only varying levels of insecurity.

The only way of living in a free society is to feel that you have the right to say and do stuff.

Discovery is fun. I am incredibly open to everything.

I hate admitting that my enemies have a point.

People don't like being around despair. Our tolerance for the truly hopeless, for those who are irredeemably broken by life is strictly limited. The sob stories we like are the ones that end before we're bored.

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.

The world is about the way in which our dreams intersect with our real life. Endlessly, the world of the imagination changes the world.

I'm a world expert on superhero comics. I think maybe only Michael Chabon knows more than me.

I suppose authoritarians don't like being made fun of because authoritarian rulers have a very inflated sense of themselves and don't like being deflated, which makes it all the more important to continue to deflate them. These are very courageous people around the world who poke fun from inside these societies. So, we now have to broaden the definition of what we mean by "writer" to include bloggers, cartoonists, song writers, visual artists - all these people are, in different ways, quite brave.

Acting was always my unscratched itch, when I was in college and even afterwards.

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.

Dissensions between Muslim nations run at least as deep, if not deeper, than those nations' resentment of the West.

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.

I am clearly vulnerable to these more passionate and volatile unstable relationships. I am trying to not be so vulnerable.

You never know the answers to the questions of life until you are asked.

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

Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory.

I had a very difficult relationship with my father, which ended up okay, but there were many difficult years.

The writers of the French enlightenment had deliberately used blasphemy as a weapon, refusing to accept the power of the Church to set limiting points on thought.

Certainly, poverty and economic decline have a lot to do with the so-called rage of Islam. You've got all these young men in countries which are economically in bad shape. The idea that they might be able to make a good living and get married and have a family, a decent life, seems very remote to a lot of people in a lot of the world.

Good advice is rarer than rubies.

Both John F. Kennedy and Nelson Mandela use the same three-word phrase which in my mind says it all, which is ‘Freedom is indivisible. You can’t slice it up, otherwise it ceases to be freedom. You can dislike Charlie Hebdo … but the fact that you dislike them has nothing to do with their right to speak.

We must conclude that it is not only a particular political ideology that has failed, but the idea that men and women could ever define themselves in terms that exclude their spiritual needs.

I think that a lot of us, whether we are religious or not - there are no words to express some things except religious words. For instance, 'soul.'

thought I was doing two things. One is inquiring into the phenomenon of revelation, if you are not a religious person. But, clearly, it's a sincere phenomenon.

English, no longer an English language, now grows from many roots.

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.

If there is a choice between absolute safety and freedom, then freedom must always prevail.

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

I'm a big-city boy. What I like is big cities. It's not just what I like. It's what I write about.

Hell is other people's fantasies.

A book is a product of a pact with the Devil that inverts the Faustian contract, he'd told Allie. Dr Faustus sacrificed eternity in return for two dozen years of power; the writer agrees to the ruination of his life, and gains (but only if he's lucky) maybe not eternity, but posterity, at least. Either way (this was Jumpy's point) it's the Devil who wins.

The world is full of things that upset people. But most of us deal with it and move on and don't try and burn the planet down.

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

In the experience of art, time seems not to exist. When I'm writing and think, "I've been working for two hours," I've actually been working for seven.

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.

When you have children, your perspective on the parent-child relationship alters.

Unless, of course, there's no such thing as chance;...in which case, we should either-optimistically-get up and cheer, because if everything is planned in advance, then we all have a meaning and are spared the terror of knowing ourselves to be random, without a why; or else, of course, we might-as pessimists-give up right here and now, understanding the futility of thought decision action, since nothing we think makes any difference anyway, things will be as they will. Where, then, is optimism? In fate or in chaos?

The problem of telling contemporary history is that your message gets outdated.

It is literature which for me opened the mysterious and decisive doors of imagination and understanding. To see the way others see. To think the way others think. And above all, to feel.

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.... Actually Existing Islam ... which makes literalism a weapon and redescription a crime, will never let the likes of me in.

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

If you take a look at history, you will find that the understanding of what is good and evil has always existed before the individual religions. The religions were only invented by people afterwards, in order to express this idea.

Anyone who reads my work will see that there are often difficult relationships between fathers and sons.

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.