Salman Rushdie Quotes

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Salman Rushdie

Profession : Novelist

Birth : June 19, 1947

Vertigo is the conflict between the fear of falling and the desire to fall.

Salman Rushdie

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

You can take the boy out of Bombay; you can't take Bombay out of the boy, you know.

Salman Rushdie

A purpose of our lives is to broaden what we can understand and say and therefore be.

Salman Rushdie

I used to say, 'There is a God-shaped hole in me.' For a long time I stressed the absence, the hole. Now I find it is the shape which has become more important.

Salman Rushdie

Out-of-step intellectuals like Noam Chomsky and the deceased Edward Said have often been dismissed as crazy extremists, 'anti-American,' and in Mr. Said's case even, absurdly, as apologists for Palestinian 'terrorism.'

Salman Rushdie

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

The answer to religion is not no religion, but another way of thinking of it. Another way of being in it.

Salman Rushdie

This strange business of what it is to be a writer is this increasingly insane world in which we live, in which surrealism, it seems, is the new realism.

Salman Rushdie

It's true that the human body is more vulnerable than the products of the human mind.

Salman Rushdie

I do think that there is such a thing as human nature, and that the things that we have in common are perhaps greater than the things that divide us.

Salman Rushdie

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

Salman Rushdie

Doubt, it seems to me, is the central condition of a human being in the twentieth century.

Salman Rushdie

If you're offended, it's your problem.

Salman Rushdie

What I worry about and don't like is the way in which the ideology of multiculturalism has declined into cultural relativism. I think that's very dangerous. When the Archbishop of Canterbury, for God's sake, says that you can't have one law for everybody... that's stupid.

Salman Rushdie

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

One of the problems with defending free speech is you often have to defend people that you find to be outrageous and unpleasant and disgusting.

Salman Rushdie

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

Salman Rushdie

I would argue that religion comes from a desire to get to the questions of, 'Where do we come from?' and 'How shall we live?' And I would say I don't need religion to answer those questions.

Salman Rushdie

Free societies are societies in motion, and with motion comes friction.

Salman Rushdie