Salman Rushdie quotes - page 4

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:

To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world.

Salman Rushdie

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

Salman Rushdie

I learned: the first lesson of my life: nobody can face the world with his eyes open all the time.

Salman Rushdie

We crave permission openly to become our secret selves.

Salman Rushdie

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

Salman Rushdie

We are described into corners, and then we must describe ourselves out of corners.

Salman Rushdie

When you throw everything up in the air anything becomes possible.

Salman Rushdie

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

Salman Rushdie

For every snake, there is a ladder; for every ladder, a snake.

Salman Rushdie

Having been borne across the world, we are translated men. It is normally supposed that something always gets lost in translation; I cling, obstinately, to the notion that something can also be gained.

Salman Rushdie

Happy endings must come at the end of something,' the Walrus pointed out. 'If they happen in the middle of a story, or an adventure, or the like, all they do is cheer things up for awhile.

Salman Rushdie

Ignorantly is how we all fall in love; for it is a kind of fall. Closing our eyes, we leap from that cliff in hope of a soft landing. Nor is it always soft; but still, without that leap nobody comes to life.

Salman Rushdie

optimism is a disease.

Salman Rushdie

Exile is a dream of a glorious return. Exile is a vision of revolution: Elba, not St Helena. It is an endless paradox: looking forward by always looking back. The exile is a ball hurled high into the air.

Salman Rushdie

My horizon's have shrunk and I have only endings to write.

Salman Rushdie

Nobody can judge an internal injury by the size of the superficial wound.

Salman Rushdie

My heart broke open and history fell in.

Salman Rushdie

Between shame and shamelessness lies the axis upon which we turn; meteorological conditions at both these poles are of the most extreme, ferocious type. Shamelessness, shame: the roots of violence.

Salman Rushdie

If love is a yearning to be like (even to become) the beloved, then hatred, it must be said, can be engendered by the same ambition, when it cannot be fulfilled.

Salman Rushdie

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

Salman Rushdie

A people that has remained convinced of its greatness and invulnerability, that has chosen to believe such a myth in the face of all the evidence, is a people in the grip of a kind of sleep, or madness.

Salman Rushdie

I know that when people pull apart, they usually employ misunderstanding as a weapon, deliberately getting hold of the stick's wrong end, impaling themselves on its point in order to prove the perfidy of the other.

Salman Rushdie