Salman Rushdie Quotes

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.

The history of a culture can be determined by its untranslatable words.

YouTube is full of pieces of trash. If you want to look on YouTube and find something that insults you, you can probably find it.

I will come back to India - so deal with it.

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 think that England made a very big, historical mistake to allow itself to become the kind of terrorist capital of the world.

It's a terrible thing that your life turns into a good story.

Discovery is fun. I am incredibly open to everything.

I am on Facebook, but mainly as a way to spy on my children. I find out more about them from their Facebook pages than from what they tell me.

But I - and I just think it's very - one of the problems of defending the extraordinary principle of freedom of speech is that you have to defend freedom of speech for people like that too.

I for one don't need a supreme "sacred" arbiter in order to be a moral being.

One of the things I know from the study of history is that history surprises you. History is not written. It's not inevitable.The victory of evil is not certain.

She saw him fracture into rainbow colors through the prism of her love.

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

The problem of telling contemporary history is that your message gets outdated.

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

When you know what you're against you have taken the first step to discovering what you're for.

Nobody wants to read a 600 page book in which the author is fabulous throughout.

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

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

No story comes from nowhere; new stories are born from old.

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

I'm definitely post-something.

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.

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

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.'

What you were is forever who you are.

Your blasphemy, Salman, can't be forgiven. To set your words against the Words of God.

For a fellow who's not to much to look at, you have the instincts of a champion.

And so it is they who, between them, give me all the reasons for believing in none.

Children are the vessels into which adults pour their poison.

The fact of being alive compensated for what life did to one.

Doubt, it seems to me, is the central condition of a human being in the twentieth century.

Life is lived forward but is judged in reverse.

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.

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

With death comes honesty.

It's fun to read things when you don't know all the words. Even children love it... they come up against weird words, and the weird words excite them.

Can one drown in one's element... If fish can drown in water, can human beings suffocate in air?

The acceptance that all that is solid has melted into the air, that reality and morality are not givens but imperfect human constructs, is the point from which fiction begins.

Ideas are interesting to me, and religions are a place where ideas have been very subtly embodied for thousands of years. All literature started as sacred literature.

The USA approach looks like bullying because it is.

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.

Killing people because you don't like their ideas - it's a bad thing.

What I do think is evident is that those countries in the world where Islamic extremism has recovered the most power, those are also the countries which are most disliked.

The world, somebody wrote, is the place we prove real by dying in it.

I have no problem with people's religious beliefs. I just don't happen to have any.

A sigh isn't just a sigh. We inhale the world and breathe out meaning. While we can. While we can.

Freedom to reject is the only freedom.