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Salman Rushdie

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Famous Salman Rushdie Quotes

“The most upsetting thing about the attack is that it has turned me once again into somebody I have tried very hard not to be. For more than thirty years I have refused to be defined by the fatwa and insisted on being seen as the author of my books—five before the fatwa and sixteen after it. I had just about managed it. When the last few books were published, people finally stopped asking me about the attack on The Satanic Verses and its author. And now here I am, dragged back into that unwanted subject. I think now I’ll never be able to escape it. No matter what I’ve already written or may now write, I’ll always be the guy who got knifed. The knife defines me. I’ll fight a battle against that, but I suspect I will lose.Living was my victory. But the meaning the knife had given my life was my defeat. In Victory City, my central character, Pampa Kampana, writes a mighty narrative poem in Sanskrit, named Jayaparajaya, meaning “Victory and Defeat.” That could also be the title for the story of my life.”

Sanskrit Language
Book:Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder
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“O Joker tinha-se efetivamente tornado um rei e vivia numa casa dourada no céu. Os cidadãos procuravam clichés e faziam por recordar que ainda havia pássaros nas árvores e o céu não tinha desabado e ainda era, muitas vezes, azul. A cidade continuava de pé. E no rádio e nas aplicações de música que soavam nos auscultadores Bluetooth dos jovens descuidados, a vida continuava. Os Yankees continuavam a estar preocupados com a sua rotação de lançamento, os Mets continuavam a fazer fraca figura e os knicks continuavam a estar condenados pela maldição de serem os knicks. A Internet continuava cheia de mentiras e o negócio da verdade estava falido. Os melhores tinham perdido toda a convicção e os piores estavam repletos de uma intensidade apaixonada e a fraqueza dos justos era revelada pela ira dos injustos. Mas a República conservava-se mais ou menos intacta. Permitam-me que o deixe aqui expresso, porque era uma afirmação muitas vezes feita para consolar aqueles de nós que não eram fáceis de consolar. De certo modo é uma ficção, mas eu repito-a. Sei que depois da tempestade vinha outra tempestade, e outra ainda. Sei que o mau tempo vai estar nas previsões meteorológicas para sempre e que os dias felizes não estão de volta e que a intolerância é o que está na moda e o sistema está na realidade viciado, mas não como o palhaço maligno nos tentou fazer crer. Às vezes os maus ganham, e que se faz quando o mundo em que se acredita se revela uma lua de papel e surge um planeta escuro que diz “Não. O mundo sou eu.” Como vivemos no seio dos nossos compatriotas quando não sabemos quais deles se contam entre os mais de sessenta milhões que puseram o horror no poder, quando não podemos distinguir quem figura entre os noventa milhões que encolheram os ombros e ficaram em casa, ou quando os nossos concidadãos nos dizem que saber coisas é elitista e detestam as elites, e tudo aquilo que sempre tivemos é a nossa mente e fomos criados na crença do encanto do conhecimento, não aquele disparate do conhecimento-é-poder, mas sim o conhecimento é beleza, e depois tudo isso, a educação, a arte, a música, os filmes, se torna uma razão para ser abominado, e a criatura surgida do Spiritus Mundi se ergue e avança indolentemente em direção a Washington, DC, para nascer. O que fiz foi recolher-me à vida privada- agarrar-me à vida como a conhecera, ao seu quotidiano e à sua força, e insistir na capacidade do universo moral dos Jardins de sobreviver até ao mais feroz dos ataques. E agora, por conseguinte, deixem a minha história ter os seus momentos derradeiros, no meio do macrolixo que possa haver à volta de lerem isto, seja a manufactrovérsia, qualquer que seja o horror ou a estupidez ou fealdade ou vergonha. Deixem-me convidar o gigantesco rei do cabelo verde de banda desenhada vitorioso, com os seus direitos cinematográficos de um bilião de dólares, a sentar-se no banco traseiro e deixar que sejam as pessoas reais a conduzir o autocarro. As nossas pequenas vidas são talvez a única coisa que logramos compreender...”

TrumpNacionalismoExtrema Direita
Book:The Golden House
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“India was the first country to ban The Satanic Verses- which was proscribed without following India's own stipulated due process in such matters, banned before it entered the country by a weak Congress government led by Rajiv Gandhi, in a desperate, unsuccessful bid for Muslim votes.”

Satanic VersesSalman RushdieRajiv GandhiAyatollah Khomeini
Book:Step Across This Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992-2002
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“Yes, I know there is a fashion nowadays for these Hitler's-valet type memoirs, and many people are against, they say we should not humanise the inhuman. But the point is they are not inhuman, these Mainduck-style little Hitlers, and it is in their humanity that we must locate our collective guilt, humanity's guilt for human beings' misdeeds; for if they are just monsters - if it is just a question of King Kong and Godzilla wreaking havoc until the aeroplanes bring them down - then the rest of us are excused.”

HumanityCollective GuiltAttrocities
Book:The Moor's last sigh
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“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”

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Book:Midnight’s Children
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“Things aren't like this," he kept repeating. "It shouldn't be this way." As if he had access to some other plane of existence, some parallel, "right" universe, and had sensed that our time had somehow been put out of joint. Such was his vehemence that I found myself believing him, believing, for example, in the possibility of that other life in which Vina had never left and we were making our lives together, all three of us, ascending together to the stars. Then he shook his head, and the spell broke. He opened his eyes, grinning ruefully. As if he knew his thoughts had infected mine. As if he knew his power. "Better get on with it," he said. "Make do with what there is.”

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Book:The Ground Beneath Her Feet
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“The enemy is stupid, he replied. That is ground for hope. There is no originality in tyrants, and they learn nothing from the demise of their precursors. They will be brutal and stifling and engender hatred and destroy what men love and that will defeat them. All important battles are, in the end, conflicts between hatred and love, and we must hold to the idea that love is stronger than hate.”

LoveHateVictoryTyrantsEnemiesBattles
Book:Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights
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“The people who kill your children are the people who’s children were playing with your children yesterday. That’s one of the most mysterious things about the 'flip' into hatred. You don’t hate the people who are strangers to you because that creates a kind of indifference; you hate the people who live next door… It’s a curious thing that love and hate are so closely tied together that just a flip of the coin can flip one into the other.”

LoveHatePsychology
Author:Salman Rushdie
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“We live in a time I did not think I would see in my lifetime, a time when freedom—and in particular freedom of expression, without which the world of books could not exist—is everywhere under attack from reactionary, authoritarian, populist, demagogic, narcissistic, careless voices; when places of education and libraries are subject to hostility and censorship; and when extremist religion and bigoted ideologies have begun to intrude in areas of life in which they do not belong. And there are also progressive voices being raised in favor of a new kind of bien-pensant censorship, one which appears virtuous, and which many people have begun to see as a virtue. So freedom is under pressure from the left as well as the right, the young as well as the old. This is something new, and made more complicated by our new tool of communication, the Internet, on which well-designed pages of malevolent lies sit side by side with the truth, and it is difficult for many people to tell which is which; and our social media, where the idea of freedom is every day abused to permit, very often, a kind of online mob rule, which the billionaire owners of these platforms seem increasingly willing to encourage—and to profit by. What do we do about free speech when it is so widely abused? We should still do, with renewed vigor, what we have always needed to do: to answer bad speech with better speech, to counter false narratives with better narratives, to answer hate with love, and to believe that the truth can still succeed even in an age of lies. We must defend it fiercely and define it as broadly as possible, so, yes, we should of course defend speech that offends us; otherwise we are not defending free expression at all. Let a thousand and one voices speak in a thousand and one different ways. To quote Cavafy, “the barbarians are coming today,” and what I do know is that the answer to philistinism is art, the answer to barbarianism is civilization, and in any war it may be that artists of all sorts—filmmakers, actors, singers, and, yes, those who practice the ancient art of the book—can still, together, turn the barbarians away from the gates.”

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Author:Salman Rushdie
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“How does newness come into the world? How is it born? Of what fusions, translations, conjoinings is it made? How does it survive, extreme and dangerous as it is? What compromises, what deals, what betrayals of its secret nature must it make to stave off the wrecking crew, the exterminating angel, the guillotine? Is birth always a fall? Do angels have wings? Can men fly?”

MenWorldDoeMadeFallBornDealsSecretDangerousBirthAngelWingsExtremesBetrayalCompromiseCrewTranslationsFusionNewnessGuillotine
Book:The Satanic Verses
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“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.”

YearsFirstsPersonsReligionFoundLostHellAtheismOne DayProveFirst TimeStrikesFleshSatanParadiseSecularForbiddenSandwichesHamSwineThunderbolts
Author:Salman Rushdie
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“...The lesson [comic books] taught children- or this child, at any rate- was perhaps the unintentionally radical truth that exceptionality was the greatest and most heroic of values; that those who were unlike the crowd were to be treasured the most lovingly; and that this exceptionality was a treasure so great that it had to be concealed, in ordinary life, beneath what the comic books called a 'secret identity'.”

ChildrenBookValuesSecretIdentityTaughtLessonsOrdinaryRateCrowdsTreasureRadicalComicHeroicComic BookConcealedOrdinary LifeTreasuredSecret Identity
Author:Salman Rushdie
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“Religion, a mediaeval form of unreason, when combined with modern weaponry becomes a real threat to our freedoms. This religious totalitarianism has caused a deadly mutation in the heart of Islam and we see the tragic consequences in Paris today. I stand with Charlie Hebdo, as we all must, to defend the art of satire, which has always been a force for liberty and against tyranny, dishonesty and stupidity. 'Respect for religion' has become a code phrase meaning 'fear of religion.' Religions, like all other ideas, deserve criticism, satire, and, yes, our fearless disrespect.”

HeartArtIdeasRealTodayFormForceReligiousLibertyModernDeserveConsequenceCriticismThreatIslamStupidityTyrannyFearlessCodeParisPhrasesTragicSatireTotalitarianismDishonestyCharlieDisrespectMutationWeaponryCharlie Hebdo
Author:Salman Rushdie
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“I don't think it is always necessary to take up the anti-colonial -- or is it post-colonial? -- cudgels against English. What seems to me to be happening is that those people who were once colonized by the language are now rapidly remaking it, domesticating it, becoming more and more relaxed about the way they use it -- assisted by the English language's enormous flexibility and size, they are carving out large territories for themselves within its frontiers.”

PeopleThinkingWayUseSeemsLanguageBecomingHappeningsSizeEnormousPostsTerritoryRelaxedFlexibilityEnglish LanguageFrontiersBecoming MoreCarving
Author:Salman Rushdie
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“To put it as simply as possible: I am not a Muslim.[...] I do not accept the charge of apostacy, because I have never in my adult life affirmed any belief, and what one has not affirmed one can not be said to have apostasized from. The Islam I know states clearly that 'there can be no coercion in matters of religion'. The many Muslims I respect would be horrified by the idea that they belong to their faith purely by virtue of birth, and that a person who freely chose not to be a Muslim could therefore be put to death.”

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Author:Salman Rushdie
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