Quotes by Salman Rushdie

About Salman Rushdie:

Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie is a British Indian novelist and essayist. His second novel, Midnight's Children (1981), won the Booker Prize in 1981. Much of his fiction is set on the Indian subcontinent. He is said to combine magical realism with historical fiction; his work is concerned with the many connections, disruptions, and migrations between Eastern and Western civilizations.
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All true believers have good reasons for disbelieving in every god except their own,' said Birbal, 'and so it is they who, between them, give me all the reasons for believing in none.

Salman Rushdie

If you were an atheist, Birbal," the Emperor challenged his first minister, "what would you say to the true believers of all the great religions of the world?" Birbal was a devout Brahmin from Trivikrampur, but he answered unhesitatingly, "I would sa...

Salman Rushdie

If power was a a cry, then human lives were lived in the echo of the cries of others.

Salman Rushdie

All men needed to hear their stories told. He was a man, but if he died without telling the story he would be something less than that, an albino cockroach, a louse. The dungeon did not udnerstand the idea of as tory. The dungeon was static, eternal,...

Salman Rushdie

A race that rejected the idea of personal sacrifice would surely be erased from time's records before long.

Salman Rushdie

...that witchcraft requires no potions, familiar spirits, or magic wands. Language upon a silver tongue affords enchantment enough.

Salman Rushdie

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 tra...

Salman Rushdie

The self may be royal, but it hungers like a pauper. [...] And it is a king imperilled, a sovereign forever at the mercy of many insurgents, of fear, for example, and anxiety, of isolation and bewilderment, of a strange unspeakable pride and a wild, ...

Salman Rushdie

And in Kandahar he was taught about survival, about fighting and killing and hunting, and he learned much else without being taught, such as looking out for himself and watching his tongue and not saying the wrong thing, the thing that might get him ...

Salman Rushdie

Sometimes by a woodland stream he watched the water rush over the pebbled bed, its tiny modulations of bounce and flow. A woman's body was like that. If you watched it carefully enough you could see how it moved to the rhythm of the world, the deep r...

Salman Rushdie

Anger is a consuming thing, a burning takeover. It sets up shop in your heart and head and murders anything else attempting to makes it way in. Life becomes obsessed with it, clouded with it, engrossed in it. You justify feeling with delusions that y...

Salman Rushdie

Neil said to me once that in times of desperation, you have to force yourself to make a decision. It's your choice, he said. Us or them. So choose.

Salman Rushdie

What kind of Christmas present would Jesus ask Santa for?

Salman Rushdie

Ideals are peaceful, history is violent.

Salman Rushdie

Neil once told me you had to become a monster so that you didn't become the victim of one instead. I don't care what anyone says. I believe him.

Salman Rushdie

Things aren't like this," he kept repeating. "It shouldn't be this way." As if he had access to some other plane of existence, some parallel, "right" universe, and had sensed that our time had somehow been put out of joint. Such was his vehemence tha...

Salman Rushdie

That was how we spoke, my mother and I: in puns and games and rhymes. In, you might say, lyrics. This was our tragedy. We were language's magpies by nature, stealing whatever sounded bright and shiny. We were tinpan alleycats, but the gift of music h...

Salman Rushdie

I allowed myself the supernatural, the transcendent, because, I told myself, our love of metaphor is pre-religious, born of our need to express what is inexpressible, our dreams of otherness, of more.

Salman Rushdie

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

Salman Rushdie

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 ...

Salman Rushdie

This is going to make me sound ancient, but I remember Juhu Beach when there weren't any buildings on it. You'd go through countryside and arrive at this amazing beach. I remember driving from Delhi to the Qutab Minar through countryside. Mehrauli wa...

Salman Rushdie

Author Bio

  • NameSalman Rushdie
  • DescriptionBritish Indian novelist and essayist
  • BornJune 19, 1947
  • CountryIndia
  • ProfessionWriter; Novelist; Essayist
  • AwardsCommandeur Des Arts Et Des Lettres?; Austrian State Prize For European Literature; PEN Pinter Prize; James Tait Black Memorial Prize; Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award