Salman Rushdie Quotes

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.

People are always telling me that they've seen people reading my books on the subway, or the beach, or whenever.

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

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

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.

Free speech is life itself.

The frustrating part of being tagged 'controversial' is people go looking for trouble where there isn't any to look for.

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.

The only thing worse than a bad review from the Ayatollah Khomeini would be a good review from the Ayatollah Khomeini.

In general, writers shouldn't be killed for what they write, though I can think of exceptions.

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

I admit it: above all things, I fear absurdity.

Few topographical boundaries can rival the frontiers of the mind.

...in words and pickles, I have immortalized my memories, although distortions are inevitable in both methods. We must live, I'm afraid, with the shadows of imperfections.

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

I've been worrying about God a little bit lately... It seems like he's been in a bad mood. And I think it has to do with the quality of lovers he's been getting.

In a novel, if you're any good, you don't just have good people or bad people. You have complicated people. You have real people.

You can't have modern states based on ideas which have been out of date for a thousand years.

I know who I am, I know what I'm for, and I know what I'm willing to fight for.

The glamour of being forbidden must not be underestimated.

Human beings do not perceive things whole; we are not gods but wounded creatures, cracked lenses, capably only of fractured perceptions. Partial beings, in all the senses of that phrase.

We all owe death a life.

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.

Look at history. It's not the account of a species at peace.

Hell is other people's fantasies.

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

If by some bizarre chance there turns out to be a god [...], I'm willing to bet he's an atheist too.

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.

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

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

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.

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

A little bit of one story joins onto an idea from another, and hey presto, . . . not old tales but new ones. Nothing comes from nothing.

I do have a lot of time for people in my life, and friendship is a very important subject for me. I think I'm unusual among the writers I know in that respect.

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

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.

The way you write a screenplay is that you close your eyes and run the movie in your head and then you write it down.

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.'

It's true that the human body is more vulnerable than the products of the human mind.

I am gagged and imprisoned. I can't even speak. I want to kick a football in a park with my son. Ordinary, banal life: my impossible dream.

'The Satanic Verses' was denied the ordinary life of a novel. It became something smaller and uglier: an insult.

I'll tell you what divorce hasn't taught me. It didn't teach me not to get married again.

With death comes honesty.

I want more than what I want. (Vina Apsara)

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

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

I don't think people cry reading 'Midnight's Children,' but a lot of people seem to cry watching the movie.

I seem to have fallen for women with missing parents. Goodness knows what it signifies.

Our lives are not what we deserve; they are, let us agree, in many ways deficient.

My grandmother was very fierce and gruff. She was quite small, but she was very wide.