Salman Rushdie Quotes

A people’s literature is the memory of the world.

Literature is the operating instructions. The best manual we have. The most useful guide to the country we’re visiting, life.

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

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.

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

Nations should have a national literature shaped by their own history, mythology and religion.

The world isn’t just the way it is. It is how we understand it, no? And in understanding something, we bring something to it, no?

The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.

Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, power to retell it, rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change, truly are powerless, because they cannot think new thoughts.

Literature is where I lived for a big part of my life, and I have always loved it.

If nobody’s interested in your work, be worried. If people are violently interested in your work, be worried.

There are times when the real world should take precedence over art, and there are times when art should take precedence over the real world.

Salman Rushdie Quotes part 2

A writer’s life and work are not a gift to mankind; they are its necessity.

I do not need the kind of love that is draining. I want someone who energizes me.

The only way to understand what has happened to you is to tell it and retell it.

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.

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

Our lives teach us who we are.

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

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

Literature is one of the most powerful forms of rebellion.

The human heart is always ready to heal.

There’s no one thing that’s true. It’s all true.

Imagination, which is a kind of erroneous thinking, makes the world what it is.

The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas — uncertainty, progress, change — into crimes.

To refuse awards is another way of accepting them with more noise than is customary.

We are defined by what we remember.

People who see themselves as stars are doomed to crash and burn.

The notion of the autonomous writer is a myth. There is no such thing.

Stories, like people and butterflies and songbirds’ eggs and human hearts and dreams, are also fragile things, made up of nothing stronger or more lasting than twenty-six letters and a handful of punctuation marks.

Men do not fight for flag or country, for the Marine Corps or glory or any other abstraction. They fight for fraternity.

Nobody has the right to not be offended.

There is a kind of cultural confounding that makes us mistake charity for clarity, conviction for aggression, and sincerity for terrorism.

Resentment is the default emotion of the powerless.

I have found nothing in science or religion that can account for the harm we do to each other.

Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts.

The only relationship that matters, that lasts, is the one with oneself.

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

The history of the world is the history of a search for freedom.

The history of the human world is not the history of its nations but of its ideas.

To unlock a society, look at its untranslatable words.

In order to love simply, it is necessary to know how to show love.

The past is put together afterwards. It can be changed.

A poet’s work is raw material, not finished work. It is offered humbly as it comes from the heart of the furnace, molten or crystallizing, and it is as valuable as the heart of the furnace.

It’s clear to me that fame is there to be used. So long as the claim for one’s own greatness doesn’t prevent attempts at truly great work, then it’s OK.