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Salman Rushdie Quotes

Indian-English novelist and essayist, Birth: 19-6-1947 Salman Rushdie Quotes
1.
In an ideal world, you could reunite the Pakistan-occupied part of Kashmir with the Indian-occupied part and restore the old borders. You could have both India and Pakistan agreeing to guarantee those borders, demilitarise the area, and to invest in it economically. In a sane world that would happen, but we don't live in a sane world.
Salman Rushdie

2.
I've never seen anywhere in the world as beautiful as Kashmir. It has something to do with the fact that the valley is very small and the mountains are very big, so you have this miniature countryside surrounded by the Himalayas, and it's just spectacular. And it's true, the people are very beautiful too.
Salman Rushdie

3.
There are things you break that can't be put back together again. And Kashmir may be one of them.
Salman Rushdie

There are situations that, once destroyed, cannot be resurrected. Kashmir may well be one of those.
4.
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.
Salman Rushdie

5.
Rock and roll music - the music of freedom frightens people and unleashes all manner of conservative defense mechanisms.
Salman Rushdie

Similar Authors: Henry David Thoreau Mark Twain C. S. Lewis Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Haruki Murakami Ayn Rand Charles Dickens George Eliot Albert Camus Kurt Vonnegut Victor Hugo Chuck Palahniuk Margaret Atwood Virginia Woolf Ernest Hemingway
6.
What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.
Salman Rushdie

7.
One of the extraordinary things about human events is that the unthinkable becomes thinkable.
Salman Rushdie

8.
Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true.
Salman Rushdie

Quote Topics by Salman Rushdie: People Thinking Writing Book World Stories Believe Children Real Men Ideas Art Country Want Religious Trying Islam Reading Dream Heart Fall Way Reality Long Giving Character Years Two Father Names
9.
‘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.
Salman Rushdie

10.
In the cookie of life, friends are the chocolate chips.
Salman Rushdie

11.
Language upon a silvered tongue affords enchantment enough.
Salman Rushdie

12.
The whole story of migration and what that has done in interconnecting the planet is obviously something I've written about a lot.
Salman Rushdie

13.
If you look at Indian movies, every time they wanted an exotic locale, they would have a dance number in Kashmir. Kashmir was India's fairyland. Indians went there because in a hot country you go to a cold place. People would be entranced by the sight of snow.
Salman Rushdie

14.
It matters, it always matters, to name rubbish as rubbish; that to do otherwise is to legitimize it.
Salman Rushdie

15.
faith without doubt is addiction
Salman Rushdie

16.
No, I don't think it's fair to label Islam 'violent.' But I will say that to my knowledge, no writer has ever gone into hiding for criticizing the Amish.
Salman Rushdie

17.
Ignorantly is how we all fall in love; for it is a kind of fall. Closing our eyes, we leap from that cliff in hope of a soft landing. Nor is it always soft; but still, without that leap nobody comes to life.
Salman Rushdie

18.
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.
Salman Rushdie

19.
If you want to tell the untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you've got to find a language. Which goes for film as well as prose, for documentary as well as autobiography. Use the wrong language, and you're dumb and blind.
Salman Rushdie

20.
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.
Salman Rushdie

21.
One of the strange things about violent and authoritarian regimes is they don't like the glare of negative publicity.
Salman Rushdie

22.
The moment you declare a set of ideas to be immune from criticism, satire, derision, or contempt, freedom of thought becomes impossible.
Salman Rushdie

23.
Two things form the bedrock of any open society - freedom of expression and rule of law. If you don't have those things, you don't have a free country.
Salman Rushdie

24.
From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable.
Salman Rushdie

25.
I stand with Charlie Hebdo, as we all must, to defend the art of satire.
Salman Rushdie

26.
An iceberg is water striving to be land; a mountain, especially a Himalaya, especially Everest, is land's attempt to metamorphose into sky; it is grounded in flight, the earth mutated--nearly--into air, and become, in the true sense, exalted. Long before she ever encountered the mountain, Allie was aware of its brooding presence in her soul.
Salman Rushdie

27.
In India, as elsewhere in our darkening world, religion is the poison in the blood. Where religion intervenes, mere innocence is no excuse. Yet we go on skating around this issue, speaking of religion in the fashionable language of 'respect.' What is there to respect in any of this, or in any of the crimes now being committed almost daily around the world in religion's dreaded name?
Salman Rushdie

28.
Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.
Salman Rushdie

29.
Reality is a question of perspective.
Salman Rushdie

30.
I'm not a prophet, but I always thought it was natural for dictatorships to fall. I remember in 1989, two months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, had you said it was going to happen no one would have believed you. The system seemed powerful and unbreakable. Suddenly overnight it blew away like dust.
Salman Rushdie

31.
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

32.
I know that when people pull apart, they usually employ misunderstanding as a weapon, deliberately getting hold of the stick's wrong end, impaling themselves on its point in order to prove the perfidy of the other.
Salman Rushdie

33.
Stories in families are colossally important. Every family has stories: some funny, some proud, some embarrassing, some shameful. Knowing them is proof of belonging to the family.
Salman Rushdie

34.
Our lives, our stories, flowed into one another's, were no longer our own, individual, discrete.
Salman Rushdie

35.
Masks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull.
Salman Rushdie

36.
We have seen many other not just writers and intellectuals, but including writers and intellectuals in the Muslim world being attacked and murdered by Islamic fanatics, accused of exactly the same things that I was, these medieval crimes of apostasy And heresy, but then broadening from that into a broader attack on all of us.
Salman Rushdie

37.
Literature is the one place in any society where, within the secrecy of our own heads, we can hear voices talking about everything in every possible way.
Salman Rushdie

38.
An attack upon our ability to tell stories is not just censorship - it is a crime against our nature as human beings.
Salman Rushdie

39.
It's one thing to say, 'I don't like what you said to me and I find it rude and offensive,' but the moment you threaten violence in return, you've taken it to another level, where you lose whatever credibility you had.
Salman Rushdie

40.
Where there is no belief, there is no blasphemy.
Salman Rushdie

41.
Good advice is rarer than rubies.
Salman Rushdie

42.
We were language's magpies by nature, stealing whatever sounded bright and shiny.
Salman Rushdie

43.
I have always thought that these two ways of talking, one is the fantastic, the fable, the fairy tale, and the other being history, the scholarly study of what happened, I think they're both amazing ways to understand human nature.
Salman Rushdie

44.
Pakistan is alarmed by the rising Indian influence in Afghanistan, and fears that an Afghanistan cleansed of the Taliban would be an Indian client state, thus sandwiching Pakistan between two hostile countries. The paranoia of Pakistan about India's supposed dark machinations should never be underestimated.
Salman Rushdie

45.
Between the adored and the adorer falls the shadow.
Salman Rushdie

46.
The lessons one learns at school are not always the ones the school thinks it's teaching.
Salman Rushdie

47.
When thought becomes excessively painful, action is the finest remedy.
Salman Rushdie

48.
We must conclude that it is not only a particular political ideology that has failed, but the idea that men and women could ever define themselves in terms that exclude their spiritual needs.
Salman Rushdie

49.
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.
Salman Rushdie

50.
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.
Salman Rushdie