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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Original thought, original artistic expression is by its very nature questioning, irreverent, iconoclastic.

Salman Rushdie

An attack upon our ability to tell stories is not just censorship - it is a crime against our nature as human beings.

Salman Rushdie

I do think that there is such a thing as human nature, and that the things that we have in common are perhaps greater than the things that divide us.

Salman Rushdie

The response of anybody interested in liberty is that we all have a say and the ability to have an argument is exactly what liberty is, even though it may never be resolved. In any authoritarian society the possessor of power dictates, and if you try...

Salman Rushdie

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

Salman Rushdie

At the height of the British Empire very few English novels were written that dealt with British power. It's extraordinary that at the moment in which England was the global superpower the subject of British power appeared not to interest most writer...

Salman Rushdie

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 wo...

Salman Rushdie

I think the veil is a way of taking power away from women.

Salman Rushdie

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.

Salman Rushdie

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.

Salman Rushdie

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.

Salman Rushdie

If I were asked for a one-sentence sound bite on religion, I would say I was against it.

Salman Rushdie

It is often said by religious people that without its framework, there is no sense of right or wrong. My view is that religion comes after ethics.

Salman Rushdie

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.

Salman Rushdie

I never thought of myself as a writer about religion until a religion came after me.

Salman Rushdie

The answer to religion is not no religion, but another way of thinking of it. Another way of being in it.

Salman Rushdie

A relationship with an imaginary woman is preferable to a relationship with a real one.

Salman Rushdie

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

Salman Rushdie

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

Salman Rushdie

British society has never been cleansed of the filth of imperialism.

Salman Rushdie

A mature society understands that at the heart of democracy is argument.

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