Salman Rushdie quotes - page 5

Sometimes we feel we straddle two cultures; at other times, that we fall between two stools. (Salman Rushdie)
Travel was pointless. It removed you from the place in which you had a meaning, and to which you gave meaning in return by dedicating your life to it, and it spirited you away into fairylands where you were, and looked, frankly absurd. View quote
Salman Rushdie
Life is lived forward but is judged in reverse. View quote
Salman Rushdie
Wherever goodness lay, it did not lie in ritual, unthinking obeisance before a deity but rather, perhaps, in the slow clumsy, error-strewn working out of an individual or collective path. View quote
Salman Rushdie
When you know what you're against you have taken the first step to discovering what you're for. View quote
Salman Rushdie
It is a funny view of the world that a book can cause riots. View quote
Salman Rushdie
The responsibility for violence lies with those who perpetrate it. View quote
Salman Rushdie
There is no right in the world not to be offended. That right simply doesn't exist. In a free society, an open society, people have strong opinions, and these opinions very often clash. In a democracy, we have to learn to deal with this. And this is true about novels, it's true about cartoons, it's true about all these products. View quote
Salman Rushdie
Our lives are not what we deserve; they are, let us agree, in many ways deficient. View quote
Salman Rushdie
If my child had prejudice in his head, I'd be ashamed. I would see it as my failure as a parent. View quote
Salman Rushdie
What one writer can make in the solitude of one room is something no power can easily destroy. (Salman Rushdie)
Be sure that you go to the author to get at his meaning, not to find yours. View quote
Salman Rushdie
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. View quote
Salman Rushdie
I hate admitting that my enemies have a point. View quote
Salman Rushdie
One of the extraordinary things about human events is that the unthinkable becomes thinkable. View quote
Salman Rushdie
Throughout human history, the apostles of purity, those who have claimed to possess a total explanation, have wrought havoc among mere mixed-up human beings. View quote
Salman Rushdie
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. View quote
Salman Rushdie
In the '50s, listening to Elvis and others on the radio in Bombay - it didn't feel alien. Noises made by a truck driver from Tupelo, Mississippi, seemed relevant to a middle-class kid growing up on the other side of the world. That has always fascinated me. View quote
Salman Rushdie
In this world without quiet corners, there can be no easy escapes from history, from hullabaloo, from terrible, unquiet fuss. View quote
Salman Rushdie
Doubt, it seems to me, is the central condition of a human being in the twentieth century. View quote
Salman Rushdie
I've been worrying about God a little bit lately. It seems as if he's been lashing out, you know, destroying cities, annihilating places. 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. If you look at the people who love God now, you know, if I was God, I'd need to destroy something. (Salman Rushdie)
A question I have often asked is, ‘What would an inoffensive political cartoon look like?' What would a respectful cartoon look like? The form requires disrespect and so if we are going to have in the world things like cartoons and satire, we just have to accept it as part of the price of freedom. View quote
Salman Rushdie
I used to say, 'There is a God-shaped hole in me.' For a long time I stressed the absence, the hole. Now I find it is the shape which has become more important. View quote
Salman Rushdie
A sigh isn't just a sigh. We inhale the world and breathe out meaning. While we can. While we can. View quote
Salman Rushdie
Music, love, death. Certainly a triangle of sorts; maybe even an eternal one. "The only people who can see the whole picture," he murmured, "are the ones who step out of the frame." (The ground beneath her feet.) View quote
Salman Rushdie