Salman Rushdie Quotes

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

Realism can break a writer's heart.

Until you know who you are you can’t write.

‎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.

Fury...sexual, Oedipal, political, magical, brutal....drives us to our finest heights and coarsest depths

He knew that his father had finally run hard enough and long enough to wear down the frontiers between the worlds, he had run clear out of his skin and into the arms of his wife, to whom he had proved, once and for all, the superiority of his love. Some migrants are happy to depart.

From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable.

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.

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.

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.

If I were asked for a one-sentence sound
bite on religion, I would say I was against it.

Mahound comes to me for revelation, asking me to choose between monotheist and henotheist alternatives, and I'm just some idiot actor having a bhaenchud nightmare, what the fuck do I know, yaar, what to tell you, help. Help.

Akhir yang bahagia harus terjadi pada akhir sesuatu, jika terjadi di pertengahann cerita atau sebuah petualangan, atau yang semacamnya, yang terjadi hanyalah hiburan sejenak. (Anjing Laut pada Harun, hal. 207)

When a reader falls in love with a book, it leaves its essence inside him, like radioactive fallout in an arable field, and after that there are certain crops that will no longer grow in him, while other, stranger, more fantastic growths may occasionally be produced."

[Books vs. Goons, L.A. Times, April 24, 2005]

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

You can get anywhere in Pakistan if you know people, even into jail.

The great are eternally at the mercy of tiny men. And also, tiny madwomen.

A book is not completed till it's read.

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.

Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination, and of the heart.