Salman Rushdie quotes - page 2

Salman Rushdie is a British-Indian novelist known for his imaginative and controversial works, such as "Midnight's Children" and "The Satanic Verses." His writing combines magical realism with historical and political themes, sparking global debate and acclaim. He has become a prominent advocate for freedom of expression and literary courage. Here are 397 of his quotes:

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

Salman Rushdie

What you were is forever who you are.

Salman Rushdie

Everything has shape, if you look for it. There is no escape from form.

Salman Rushdie

There is nothing like a War for the reinvention of lives...

Salman Rushdie

What's the use of stories that aren't even true?

Salman Rushdie

God, Satan, Paradise, and Hell all vanished one day in my fifteenth year, when I quite abruptly lost my faith. ... and afterwards, to prove my new-found atheism, I bought myself a rather tasteless ham sandwich, and so partook for the first time of the forbidden flesh of the swine. No thunderbolt arrived to strike me down. ... From that day to this I have thought of myself as a wholly secular person.

Salman Rushdie

Rock and roll music - the music of freedom frightens people and unleashes all manner of conservative defense mechanisms.

Salman Rushdie

I do not need the idea of God to explain the world I live in.

Salman Rushdie

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

Salman Rushdie

Friendships are the family we make - not the one we inherit. I've always been someone to whom friendship, elective affinities, is as important as family.

Salman Rushdie

Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts.

Salman Rushdie

It is very, very easy not to be offended by a book. You just have to shut it.

Salman Rushdie

If Woody Allen were a Muslim, he'd be dead by now.

Salman Rushdie

What's real and what's true aren't necessarily the same.

Salman Rushdie

I fell victim to the temptation of every autobiographer, to the illusion that since the past exists only in one's memories and the words which strive vainly to encapsulate them, it is possible to create past events simply by saying they occurred.

Salman Rushdie

Reality is a question of perspective the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems --but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems incredible.

Salman Rushdie

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.

Salman Rushdie

He knew what he knew: that the real world was full of magic, so magical worls could easily be real.

Salman Rushdie

Now I know what a ghost is. Unfinished business, that's what.

Salman Rushdie

Free societies... are societies in motion, and with motion comes tension, dissent, friction. Free people strike sparks, and those sparks are the best evidence of freedom's existence.

Salman Rushdie

A book is not completed till it's read.

Salman Rushdie

Realism can break a writer's heart.

Salman Rushdie