Quotessence
Home / Authors / Salman Rushdie
Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie Quotes

Novelist

Filter quotes by topic

AllPeopleIfsWorldThinkingWritingBookStoriesKnowsWayHumans

Famous Salman Rushdie Quotes

“Sometimes people have said that Islam, in its own calendar, is still only in the Middle Ages. It's still in the fifteenth century or whatever. And Christianity in the fifteenth century, after all, was full of inquisitions and burnings at the stake, and so on and so on. So give Islam time, and it will reach the point of maturity that other religions have. But Mormonism is much younger than Islam, and it's got there already. So I don't think that's an argument that works.”

PeopleThinkingGivingSaidStillsSometimesAgeChristianityMiddleCenturyArgumentIslamBurningMaturityStakesMiddle AgesCalendarsInquisitionMormonismBurning At The Stake
Author:Salman Rushdie
Create image

“This was an age before e-books. We all knew that the only way you can allow a book to survive in print in the long term is in paperback. The hardback has a certain life, and then it stops having that. It stops selling, and if you want the book to just stay around there has to be a paperback edition. So if there were not a paperback edition the book would eventually disappear from the shelves, and we would have lost the battle.”

IfsWayWantLongBookAgeCertainLostTermBattleDisappearSellingLong TermPrintShelves
Author:Salman Rushdie
Create image

“It seems to me it's perfectly possible to vehemently disagree with a piece of work and to say that it's offensive and insulting and so on and so on. And you're absolutely entitled to do that and to speak back, if you like, against that piece of speech with all the vehemence at your disposal. I mean, that's legitimate. Even other things. People have a right to demonstrate.”

PeopleIfsMeanSeemsSpeakPiecesSpeechDisagreeEntitledOffensiveInsultingVehemence
Author:Salman Rushdie
Create image

“You can't assume if you do something contentious that people will be on your side. The moment violence enters the story, the story changes. Then the question is, "How do you face up to violence?" And then you have to have a no-compromise position. And this is quite simply a lesson we learn in the school playground.”

PeopleIfsMomentsStoriesSchoolFacesSidesViolencePositionLessonsAssumingCompromiseYour SidePlaygroundsNo CompromiseContentious
Author:Salman Rushdie
Create image

“You've got a generation of young men - almost all are young men - in situations of great economic hardship, where they don't really have work. The chances of them making a decent life for themselves, of making a family, living in a kind of decent, happy way, are very, very remote. It's very hard for them to ever even have that as a dream, so when people are that deprived of the ordinary hope of human beings, it creates anger. And that anger can be channeled by unscrupulous persons, whether secular or religious leaders, and there's been a lot of that.”

PeopleMenWayHumansKindPersonsHardDreamYoungReligiousChanceHuman BeingsSituationLeaderGenerationsEconomicOrdinaryYoung ManDecentHardshipSecularDeprivedReligious LeadersDecent Life
Author:Salman Rushdie
Create image

“We live in an age where the rate of change has been colossal. Colossal. Almost every week there's some transformation of some kind, whether technological or political or scientific, whatever. And I think it's bewildering to human beings to live in a time when they can't take anything as fixed - when everything is shifting and changing all the time.”

ThinkingHumansKindHas BeensAgePoliticalHuman BeingsWeekTransformationRateFixedTechnologicalShiftingColossalRate Of Change
Author:Salman Rushdie
Create image

“The rate of change is global now. I think there's a kind of mind that is so ill at ease with that transformation that it reaches out for something permanent. And religious faith offers that, from simplicities, which you are told are eternal and unchanging, and you can hold on to those like a life raft in a metamorphosing world.”

ThinkingWorldMindKindReligiousOffersEternalTransformationRateSimplicityIllPermanentEaseReach OutReligious FaithUnchangingRate Of Change
Author:Salman Rushdie
Create image

“The most obvious inspiration to be brave is that we all feel it: you can't have free expression right now in a very wide range of countries. It takes a lot of guts for writers and journalists in those countries to stand up against repression and do what they do. Russia is a case in point where, as you know, journalists have an embarrassing habit of being killed for their reporting.”

CountryInspirationHabitBraveObviousJournalistGutsEmbarrassingBe Brave
Author:Salman Rushdie
Create image

“Vulnerability of artists is definitely what makes organizations like PEN necessary because, as I tried to argue, the actual work that writers and artists do has an ornery way of surviving. Particularly in this age of the internet, it is very easy for forbidden work to be found online somewhere if you know where to look. Artists themselves, however, are in increasing danger, and not just artists. The great concern is that year after year, rising numbers of journalists are being killed in pursuit of their work.”

AgeArtistEasyDangerInternetConcernArguingJournalistVulnerabilityOnlinePensForbiddenSurviving
Author:Salman Rushdie
Create image

“I suppose authoritarians don't like being made fun of because authoritarian rulers have a very inflated sense of themselves and don't like being deflated, which makes it all the more important to continue to deflate them. These are very courageous people around the world who poke fun from inside these societies. So, we now have to broaden the definition of what we mean by "writer" to include bloggers, cartoonists, song writers, visual artists - all these people are, in different ways, quite brave.”

PeopleWorldMeanImportantDifferentArtistSongFunBraveCourageousRulersCartoonistVisual ArtPoke
Author:Salman Rushdie
Create image

“I have a general feeling that writers and artists who are in this peculiar situation, of being a persecuted artist, all anyone ever asks about is the persecution. It may well be that's the last thing in the world they want to talk about. There were many years in which every journalist in the world wanted to talk to me, but nobody wanted to talk to me about my work. That felt deeply frustrating because I felt there was an attempt to stifle me as an artist. The best revenge I could have was to write.”

WorldWritingFeelingsArtistSituationRevengeJournalistPersecutionFrustratingTalk To MeBest Revenge
Author:Salman Rushdie
Create image

“There's no point going to a country which is torturing people to ask them to stop if they can point out that the United States is doing it too. It enormously weakens the argument. Back in the early days of the Bush administration, PEN made a decision that we would try and make human rights issues and civil rights issues in this country part of the priority, and not just international issues, which had more or less been the priority up until then.”

PeopleTryingCountryDecisionArgumentHuman RightsPrioritiesCivil RightsPens
Author:Salman Rushdie
Create image

“The desire for story is very, very deep in human beings. We are the only creature in the world that does this; we are the only creature that tells stories, and sometimes those are true stories and sometimes those are made up stories. Then there are the larger stories, the grand narratives that we live in, which are things like nation and family and clan and so on. Those stories are considered to be treated reverentially. They need to be part of the way in which we conduct the discourse of our lives and to prevent people from doing something very damaging to human nature.”

PeopleWorldSometimesDesireHuman NatureVery DeepTrue Story
Author:Salman Rushdie
Create image

“One of the problems of truth being censored for a really long time is that people lose the ability to intuit what truth might be, and therefore begin to swallow whatever they're fed. I think that's something that the Chinese have learned very well. They've even managed to persuade quite large segments of the population that the martyrs of Tiananmen were actually an anti-national element. People don't view them as heroes, they see them as troublemakers. There you have a combination of censorship of truth creating a new truth, which is the lie, but it's not seen as such.”

PeopleThinkingLongProblemLyingAbilityHeroTruth IsChineseCensorshipMartyrReally LongTroublemaker
Author:Salman Rushdie
Create image

“In our time, we have become too interested in the artist and his or her character and experience as a way of understanding art. In my view, you should be able to read a book or see a film without knowing a single thing about conditions or circumstances or character of the artist, and experience the work to the full without such information. Sometimes I feel - speaking for myself - that people know much too much about me, and I wish people knew less and could just read these books and respond to them purely as words on a page.”

PeopleArtBookSometimesCharacterFilmArtistWishUnderstandingCircumstances
Author:Salman Rushdie
Create image

“It's difficult not to color our perception of author's product with his personality. There are so many examples of this. What do we think of Ezra Pound - clearly a great poet and clearly kind of an asshole? You can say the same thing about Louis-Ferdinand Céline, who clearly was a Nazi sympathizer, and yet one of the great writers of the 20th century. It is tough, but there are enough examples around where we have to somehow find a way of separating the work from the artist and seeing what there is to see in the work, while also condemning the thoughts we see in the man.”

ThinkingMenKindEnoughArtistDifficultHe ManPoetPersonalityPerceptionToughNazi20th CenturyGreat WritersGreat Poet
Author:Salman Rushdie
Create image