Salman Rushdie quotes - page 6

Islam doesn't have to mean blind faith. It can mean what it always meant in your family, a culture, a civilization, as open-minded as your grandfather was, as delightedly disputatious as your father was. ... Don't let the zealots make Muslim a terrifying word, I urged myself; remember when it meant family. (Salman Rushdie)
It's fun to read things when you don't know all the words. Even children love it. View quote
Salman Rushdie
Ibn Rushd's ideas were silenced in their time. View quote
Salman Rushdie
It's the very playful, very natural result of juggling languages. You are always reaching for the most appropriate phrase. View quote
Salman Rushdie
What is there to respect in any of this, or in any of the crimes now being committed almost daily around the world in religion's dreaded name? How well, with what fatal results, religion erects totems, and how willing we are to kill for them! And when we've done it often enough, the deadening of affect that results makes it easier to do it again. So India's problem turns out to be the world's problem. What happened in India has happened in God's name. The problem's name is God. View quote
Salman Rushdie
I know that many people do care, and are appalled by the ... upside-down logic of the post-fatwa world, in which a ... novelist can be accused of having savaged or "mugged" a whole community, becoming its tormentor (instead of its ... victim) and the scapegoat for ... its discontents... . (What minority is smaller and weaker than a minority of one?) View quote
Salman Rushdie
Who what am I? My answer: I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. View quote
Salman Rushdie
When I was growing up, everyone around me was fond of fooling around with words. View quote
Salman Rushdie
I repeat for the last time: to understand me, you'll have to swallow a world. View quote
Salman Rushdie
Nothing really improves us. Whatever improves one person will disimprove another. View quote
Salman Rushdie
The Satanic Verses celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs. It rejoices in mongrelization and fears the absolutism of the Pure. (Salman Rushdie)
The moment you say that any idea system is sacred, whether it's a religious belief system or a secular ideology, the moment you declare a set of ideas to be immune from criticism, satire, derision, or contempt, freedom of thought becomes impossible. View quote
Salman Rushdie
The Satanic Verses is for change-by-fusion, change-by-conjoining. It is a love song to our mongrel selves. View quote
Salman Rushdie
And if that plunges me into contradiction and paradox, so be it; I've lived in that messy ocean all my life. I've fished in it for my art. View quote
Salman Rushdie
So they come up against weird words, and the weird words excite them. View quote
Salman Rushdie
The lessons one learns at school are not always the ones the school thinks it's teaching. View quote
Salman Rushdie
... because silence, too, has an echo, hollower and longer-lasting than the reverberations of any sound. View quote
Salman Rushdie
everything is relative, one man's absolute belief is another man's fairy tale. View quote
Salman Rushdie
Confusion to our enemies! View quote
Salman Rushdie
What is there to respect in any of this, or in any of the crimes now being committed almost daily around the world in religion's dreaded name? How well, with what fatal results, religion erects totems, and how willing we are to kill for them! And when we've done it often enough, the deadening of affect that results makes it easier to do it again. View quote
Salman Rushdie
India is my kid sister. (Salman Rushdie)
The Chinese are good at repression and can be pretty ruthless about it. View quote
Salman Rushdie
I'm a world expert on superhero comics. I think maybe only Michael Chabon knows more than me. View quote
Salman Rushdie
In general, writers shouldn't be killed for what they write, though I can think of exceptions. View quote
Salman Rushdie
One of the strange things about violent and authoritarian regimes is they don't like the glare of negative publicity. View quote
Salman Rushdie