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Salman Rushdie Quotes | Quotes said by Salman Rushdie

  • Salman Rushdie Quote #1

    - Enquanto a queda dos anjos era uma simples questão de poder; nem mais nem menos do que um trabalhinho de policiamento celestial, o castigo de uma rebelião, uma atitude de dureza pour décourageur les autres. - Quão pouca confiança em Si própria devia, pois, ter esta divindade que não queria que as Suas mais perfeitas criaturas distinguissem o bem do mal; o que reinava pelo terror, exigindo a submissão absoluta até dos Seus colaboradores mais próximos, despachando todos os dissidentes para as Suas ardentes Sibérias, para os gulags do Inferno.

  • Salman Rushdie Quote #2

    ...because it is the privilige and the curse of midnight's children to be both masters and victims of their times, to forsake privacy and be sucked into the annihilating whirlpool of the multitudes, and to be unable to live or die in peace.

  • Salman Rushdie Quote #3

    ...one could accept Muhammad as a genuine mystic—just as one could accept Joan of Arc's voices as having genuinely been heard by her, or the revelations of Saint John the Divine as being that troubled soul's 'real' experiences—without needing also to accept that, had one been standing next to the Prophet of Islam on Mount Hira that day, one would also have seen the Archangel.

  • Salman Rushdie Quote #4

    ...that witchcraft requires no potions, familiar spirits, or magic wands. Language upon a silver tongue affords enchantment enough.

  • Salman Rushdie Quote #5

    ...what a leveller this remote-control gizmo was...it chopped down the heavyweight and stretched out the slight until all the set's emissions, commercials, murders, game-shows, the thousand and one varying joys and terrors of the real and the imagined, acquired an equal weight...

  • Salman Rushdie Quote #6

    ..now, seated hunched over paper in a pool of Anglepoised light, I no longer want to be anything except what who I am. Who what am I? My answer: I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I've gone which would not have happened if I had not come. Nor am I particularly exceptional in this matter; each 'I', every one of the now-six-hundred-million-plus of us, contains a similar multitude. I repeat for the last time: to understand me, you'll have to swallow a world.

  • Salman Rushdie Quote #7

    ?No people whose word for 'yesterday' is the same as their word for 'tomorrow' can be said to have a firm grip on the time.

  • Salman Rushdie Quote #8

    [What Rushdie took away from reading Gunter Grass's The Tin Drum]: Go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets. Take a deep breath before you begin talking. Aim for the stars. Keep grinning. Be ruthless. Argue with the world. And never forget that writing is as close as we get to keeping a hold on the thousand and one things--childhood, certainties, cities, doubts, dreams, instants, phrases, parents, loves--that go on slipping like sand, through our fingers.

  • Salman Rushdie Quote #9

    A book is a product of a pact with the Devil that inverts the Faustian contract, he'd told Allie. Dr Faustus sacrificed eternity in return for two dozen years of power; the writer agrees to the ruination of his life, and gains (but only if he's lucky) maybe not eternity, but posterity, at least. Either way (this was Jumpy's point) it's the Devil who wins.

  • Salman Rushdie Quote #10

    A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it or offer your own version in return.

  • Salman Rushdie Quote #11

    A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return.

  • Salman Rushdie Quote #12

    A book is not completed till it's read.

  • Salman Rushdie Quote #13

    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 Quote #14

    A little thinking is a dangerous thing.

  • Salman Rushdie Quote #15

    A man who catches History's eye is thereafter bound to a mistress from whom he will never escape.

  • Salman Rushdie Quote #16

    A poet's work . . . to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep.

  • Salman Rushdie Quote #17

    A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.

  • Salman Rushdie Quote #18

    A race that rejected the idea of personal sacrifice would surely be erased from time's records before long.

  • Salman Rushdie Quote #19

    All liberty required was that the space for discourse itself be protected. Liberty lay in the argument itself, not the resolution of that argument, in the ability to quarrel, even with the most cherished beliefs of others; a free society was not placid but turbulent. The bazaar of conflicting was the place where freedom rang.

  • Salman Rushdie Quote #20

    All men needed to hear their stories told. He was a man, but if he died without telling the story he would be something less than that, an albino cockroach, a louse. The dungeon did not udnerstand the idea of as tory. The dungeon was static, eternal, black and a story needed motion adn tiem and light. He felt his story slipping away from him, beocming inconsequential, ceasing to be. He has no story. There was no story. He was not a man. There was no man here. There was only the dungeon, and the slithering dark.

  • Salman Rushdie Quote #21

    All true believers have good reasons for disbelieving in every god except their own,' said Birbal, 'and so it is they who, between them, give me all the reasons for believing in none.

  • Salman Rushdie Quote #22

    Alone, [Chamcha] all at once remembered that he and Pamela had once disagreed, as they disagreed on everything, on a short-story they’d both read, whose theme was precisely the nature of the unforgivable. Title and author eluded him, but the story came back vividly. A man and a woman had been intimate friends (never lovers) for all their adult lives. On his twenty-first birthday (they were both poor at the time) she had given him, as a joke, the most horrible, cheap glass vase she could find, in colours a garish parody of Venetian gaiety. Twenty years later, when they were both successful and greying, she visited his home and quarrelled with him over his treatment of a mutual friend. In the course of the quarrel her eye fell upon the old vase, which he still kept in pride of place on his sitting-room mantelpiece, and, without pausing in her tirade, she swept it to the floor, crushing it beyond hope of repair. He never spoke to her again; when she died, half a century later, he refused to visit her deathbed or attend her funeral, even though messengers were sent to tell him that these were her dearest wishes. ‘Tell her,’ he said to the emissaries, 'that she never knew how much I valued what she broke.’ The emissaries argued, pleaded, raged. If she had not known how much meaning he had invested in the trifle, how could she in all fairness be blamed? And had she not made countless attempts, over the years, to apologize and atone? And she was dying, for heaven’s sake; could not this ancient, childish rift be healed at last? They had lost a lifetime’s friendship; could they not even say goodbye? 'No,’ said the unforgiving man. – 'Really because of the vase? Or are you concealing some other, darker matter?’ – 'It was the vase,’ he answered, 'the vase, and nothing but.’ Pamela thought the man petty and cruel, but Chamcha had even then appreciated the curious privacy, the inexplicable inwardness of the issue. 'Nobody can judge an internal injury,’ he had said, 'by the size of the superficial wound, of the hole.

  • Salman Rushdie Quote #23

    Among the great struggles of man-good/evil, reason/unreason, etc.-there is also this mighty conflict between the fantasy of Home and the fantasy of Away, the dream of roots and the mirage of the journey.

  • Salman Rushdie Quote #24

    And eventually in that house where everyone, even the fugitive hiding in the cellar from his faceless enemies, finds his tongue cleaving dryly to the roof of his mouth, where even the sons of the house have to go into the cornfield with the rickshaw boy to joke about whores and compare the length of their members and whisper furtively about dreams of being film directors (Hanif's dream, which horrifies his dream-invading mother, who believes the cinema to be an extension of the brothel business), where life has been transmuted into grotesquery by the irruption into it of history, eventually in the murkiness of the underworld he cannot help himself, he finds his eyes straying upwards, up along delicate sandals and baggy pajamas and past loose kurta and above the dupatta, the cloth of modesty, until eyes meet eyes, and then

  • Salman Rushdie Quote #25

    And in Kandahar he was taught about survival, about fighting and killing and hunting, and he learned much else without being taught, such as looking out for himself and watching his tongue and not saying the wrong thing, the thing that might get him killed. About the dignity of the lost, about losing, and how it cleansed the soul to accept defeat, and about letting go, avoiding the trap of holding on too tightly to what you wanted, and about abandonment in general, and in particular fatherlesness, the lessness of fathers, the lessness of the fatherless, and the best defenses of those who are less against those who are more: inwardness, forethought, cunning, humility and good peripheral vision. The many lessons of lessness. The lessening from which growing could begin.

  • Salman Rushdie Quote #26

    As a writer, one of the things we all learned from the movies was a kind of compression that didn't exist before people were used to watching films. For instance, if you wanted to write a flashback in a novel, you once had to really contextualize it a lot, to set it up. Now, readers know exactly what you're doing. Close-ups, too.

  • Salman Rushdie Quote #27

    As though she had entered a fable, as though she were no more than words crawling along a dry page, or as though she were becoming that page itself, that surface on which her story would be written and across which there blew a hot and merciless wind, turning her body to papyrus, her skin to parchment, her soul to paper.

  • Salman Rushdie Quote #28

    At sixteen, you still think you can escape from your father. You aren't listening to his voice speaking through your mouth, you don't see how your gestures already mirror his; you don't see him in the way you hold your body, in the way you sign your name. You don't hear his whisper in your blood.

  • Salman Rushdie Quote #29

    Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.

  • Salman Rushdie Quote #30

    Broad-mindedness is related to tolerance; open-mindedness is the sibling of peace.

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