Salman Rushdie Quotes

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

“Faith without doubt is addiction.”

“Free societies are societies in motion, and with motion comes tension, dissent, friction. Free people strike sparks, and those sparks are the best evidence of freedom's existence.”

“Nobody has the right to not be offended. That right doesn't exist in any declaration I have ever read.

If you are offended it is your problem, and frankly lots of things offend lots of people.

I can walk into a bookshop and point out a number of books that I find very unattractive in what they say. But it doesn't occur to me to burn the bookshop down. If you don't like a book, read another book. If you start reading a book and you decide you don't like it, nobody is telling you to finish it.

To read a 600-page novel and then say that it has deeply offended you: well, you have done a lot of work to be offended.”

“Perhaps the story you finish is never the one you begin.”

“What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.”

“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.”

“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 bloody-minded. 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.”

“Children are the vessels into which adults pour their poison.”

“I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been 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'm gone which would not have happened if I had not come.”

“I learned the first lesson of my life: nobody can face the world with his eyes open all the time.”

“Memory's truth, because memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else's version more than his own.”

“Most of what matters in our lives takes place in our absence.”

“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.”

“Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems – but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible.”

“To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world.”

“We all owe death a life.”

“What can't be cured must be endured.”

“What's real and what's true aren't necessarily the same.”

“A photograph is a moral decision taken in one eighth of a second.”

“The only people who see the whole picture are the ones who step out of the frame.”

“Whenever someone who knows you disappears, you lose one version of yourself. Yourself as you were seen, as you were judged to be. Lover or enemy, mother or friend, those who know us construct us, and their several knowings slant the different facets of our characters like diamond-cutter's tools. Each such loss is a step leading to the grave, where all versions blend and end.”

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

“From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable.”

“Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true.”

“Now I know what a ghost is. Unfinished business, that's what.”

“The world, somebody wrote, is the place we prove real by dying in it.”

“There is no bitterness like that of man who finds out he has been believing in a ghost.”

“You can't judge an internal injury by the size of the hole.”