Salman Rushdie quote: "And my chutneys and kasaundies are, after all, connected to my nocturnal scribblings –– by day amongst the pickle-vats, by night within these sheets, I spend my time at the great work of preserving. Memory, as well as fruit, is being saved from the corruption of the clocks."

We are the storytelling animal.
SALMAN RUSHDIE

It is very, very easy not to be offended by a book. You just have to shut it.
SALMAN RUSHDIE

What happened in Pakistan was that people were told: You're all Muslim, so now you're a coun...
SALMAN RUSHDIE

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

War used to be something you could stand on the nearby hill and watch. Now we have total war; everyb...
SALMAN RUSHDIE

There is nothing intrinsic linking any religion with any act of violence. The crusades don't pro...
SALMAN RUSHDIE

The First Amendment defends all forms of speech including hate speech, which is why groups like Ku K...
SALMAN RUSHDIE

One of the problems with defending free speech is you often have to defend people that you find to b...
SALMAN RUSHDIE

When you write, you write out of your best self. Everything else drops away.
SALMAN RUSHDIE

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

Censorship is the thing that stops you doing what you want to do, and what writers want to talk abou...
SALMAN RUSHDIE

In an ideal world, you could reunite the Pakistan-occupied part of Kashmir with the Indian-occupied ...
SALMAN RUSHDIE

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

So India’s problem turns out to be the world’s problem. What happened in India has happened in G...
SALMAN RUSHDIE

‎No people whose word for 'yesterday' is the same as their word for 'tomorrow' can be said to have...
SALMAN RUSHDIE

The novel does not seek to establish a privileged language but it insists upon the freedom to portra...
SALMAN RUSHDIE

The acceptance that all that is solid has melted into the air, that reality and morality are not giv...
SALMAN RUSHDIE

Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can't forgive.
SALMAN RUSHDIE

Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; t...
SALMAN RUSHDIE

I make no complaint. I am a writer. I do not accept my condition; I will strive to change it; but I ...
SALMAN RUSHDIE

I have been a film buff all my life and believe that the finest cinema is fully the equal of the bes...
SALMAN RUSHDIE

The suicide bomber's imagination leads him to believe in a brilliant act of heroism, when in fac...
SALMAN RUSHDIE

Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plaus...
SALMAN RUSHDIE

In writing 'The Satanic Verses,' I think I was writing for the first time from the whole of ...
SALMAN RUSHDIE

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

I do think of Bombay as my hometown. Those are the streets I walked when I was learning to walk. And...
SALMAN RUSHDIE

I have always thought, the secret purpose of the book tour is to make the writer hate the book he...
SALMAN RUSHDIE

Names, once they are in common use, quickly become mere sounds, their etymology being buried, like s...
SALMAN RUSHDIE

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

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

A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape t...
SALMAN RUSHDIE

The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because ...
SALMAN RUSHDIE

I used to say: there is a God-shaped hole in me. For a long time I stressed the absence, the hole. N...
SALMAN RUSHDIE

The real risks for any artist are taken in pushing the work to the limits of what is possible, in th...
SALMAN RUSHDIE

The writers of the French enlightenment had deliberately used blasphemy as a weapon, refusing to acc...
SALMAN RUSHDIE

This paranoid Islam, which blames outsider, 'infidels', for all the ills of Muslim societies...
SALMAN RUSHDIE

I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything do...
SALMAN RUSHDIE

If you want to tell the untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you've got to fi...
SALMAN RUSHDIE

The liveliness of literature lies in its exceptionality, in being the individual, idiosyncratic visi...
SALMAN RUSHDIE

The only privilege literature deserves -- and this privilege it requires in order to exist -- is the...
SALMAN RUSHDIE

Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human ...
SALMAN RUSHDIE

Literature is the one place in any society where, within the secrecy of our own heads, we can hear v...
SALMAN RUSHDIE

We must conclude that it is not only a particular political ideology that has failed, but the idea t...
SALMAN RUSHDIE

In this world without quiet corners, there can be no easy escapes from history, from hullabaloo, fro...
SALMAN RUSHDIE

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

For the barbarians were not only at our gates but within our skins. We were our own wooden horses, e...
SALMAN RUSHDIE

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

Such is the miraculous nature of the future of exiles: what is first uttered in the impotence of an ...
SALMAN RUSHDIE

Your blasphemy, Salman, can't be forgiven. To set your words against the Words of God.
SALMAN RUSHDIE

Where there is no belief, there is no blasphemy.
SALMAN RUSHDIE

Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plaus...
SALMAN RUSHDIE

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

Realism can break a writer's heart.
SALMAN RUSHDIE

Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, the power to retell it, rethi...
SALMAN RUSHDIE

...because it is the privilige and the curse of midnight's children to be both masters and victims o...
SALMAN RUSHDIE

Thomas Pynchon looks exactly like Thomas Pynchon should look. He is tall, he wears lumberjack shirts...
SALMAN RUSHDIE

I hate admitting that my enemies have a point.
SALMAN RUSHDIE

Most American writers don't get asked their opinion on current affairs, whereas in Europe and En...
SALMAN RUSHDIE

Stories in families are colossally important. Every family has stories: some funny, some proud, some...
SALMAN RUSHDIE

I think, in a written novel, the way in which you play with the readers' emotion or the way in w...
SALMAN RUSHDIE

An attack upon our ability to tell stories is not just censorship - it is a crime against our nature...
SALMAN RUSHDIE

Pakistan is alarmed by the rising Indian influence in Afghanistan, and fears that an Afghanistan cle...
SALMAN RUSHDIE

British society has never been cleansed of the filth of imperialism.
SALMAN RUSHDIE

Straight answers were beyond the powers of Rashid Khalifa, who would never take a short cut if there...
SALMAN RUSHDIE

Self-censorship is a lie to yourself; if you are going to be trying to seriously create art, to crea...
SALMAN RUSHDIE

What's real and what's true aren't necessarily the same.
SALMAN RUSHDIE

Most of what matters in our lives takes place in our absence.
SALMAN RUSHDIE

faith without doubt is addiction
SALMAN RUSHDIE

Our lives disconnect and reconnect, we move on, and later we may again touch one another, again boun...
SALMAN RUSHDIE

The only people who see the whole picture,' he murmured, 'are the ones who step out of the frame.
SALMAN RUSHDIE

We all owe death a life.
SALMAN RUSHDIE

Free societies...are societies in motion, and with motion comes tension, dissent, friction. Free peo...
SALMAN RUSHDIE

To understand just one life you have to swallow the world ... do you wonder, then, that I was a heav...
SALMAN RUSHDIE

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

A photograph is a moral decision taken in one eighth of a second.
SALMAN RUSHDIE

A poet's work . . . to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape...
SALMAN RUSHDIE

What kind of idea are you? Are you the kind that compromises, does deals, accomodates itself to soci...
SALMAN RUSHDIE

When a reader falls in love with a book, it leaves its essence inside him, like radioactive fallout ...
SALMAN RUSHDIE

Go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets. Take a deep breath before you b...
SALMAN RUSHDIE

Now I know what a ghost is. Unfinished business, that's what.
SALMAN RUSHDIE

Memory's truth, because memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates...
SALMAN RUSHDIE

Whenever someone who knows you disappears, you lose one version of yourself. Yourself as you were se...
SALMAN RUSHDIE

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

My horizon's have shrunk and I have only endings to write.
SALMAN RUSHDIE

Make as much racket as you like people. Noise is life and an excess of noise is a sign that life is ...
SALMAN RUSHDIE

In television, the 60-minute series, 'The Wire' and 'Mad Men' and so on, the writer ...
SALMAN RUSHDIE

If the creative artist worries if he will still be free tomorrow, then he will not be free today.
SALMAN RUSHDIE

Hyperrealism can create an atmosphere of surrealism because nobody sees the world in such detail.
SALMAN RUSHDIE

The difference between memoir and autobiography, as far as I see it, is that a memoir is there prima...
SALMAN RUSHDIE

In any authoritarian society, the possessor of power dictates, and if you try and step outside, he w...
SALMAN RUSHDIE

One of the strange things about violent and authoritarian regimes is they don't like the glare o...
SALMAN RUSHDIE

The response of anybody interested in liberty is that we all have a say and the ability to have an a...
SALMAN RUSHDIE

Many writers who have had to deal with the subject of atrocity can't face it head-on.
SALMAN RUSHDIE

Throughout human history, the apostles of purity, those who have claimed to possess a total explanat...
SALMAN RUSHDIE

If you live in free countries, you don't have to spend all your life arguing about freedom becau...
SALMAN RUSHDIE

What I worry about and don't like is the way in which the ideology of multiculturalism has decli...
SALMAN RUSHDIE

Sometimes great, banned works defy the censor's description and impose themselves on the world -...
SALMAN RUSHDIE

The Koran was revealed at a time of great change in the Arab world, the seventh-century shift from a...
SALMAN RUSHDIE

One of the reasons my name is Rushdie is that my father was an admirer of Ibn Rush'd, the 12th c...
SALMAN RUSHDIE

At the height of the British Empire very few English novels were written that dealt with British pow...
SALMAN RUSHDIE

Original thought, original artistic expression is by its very nature questioning, irreverent, iconoc...
SALMAN RUSHDIE

There are two things in Indian history - one is the incredible optimism and potential of the place, ...
SALMAN RUSHDIE

The only thing worse than a bad review from the Ayatollah Khomeini would be a good review from the A...
SALMAN RUSHDIE

I've been fascinated by Machiavelli since I was very young. I've always felt that he had a b...
SALMAN RUSHDIE

I'm not a prophet, but I always thought it was natural for dictatorships to fall. I remember in ...
SALMAN RUSHDIE

But there's one thing we must all be clear about: terrorism is not the pursuit of legitimate goa...
SALMAN RUSHDIE

I'm a big-city boy. What I like is big cities. It's not just what I like. It's what I wr...
SALMAN RUSHDIE

Two things form the bedrock of any open society - freedom of expression and rule of law. If you don&...
SALMAN RUSHDIE

Mahound comes to me for revelation, asking me to choose between monotheist and henotheist alternativ...
SALMAN RUSHDIE

Don't let the zealots make Muslim a terrifying word."

[1,000 Days 'Trapped Inside a Me...
SALMAN RUSHDIE

And my chutneys and kasaundies are, after all, connected to my nocturnal scribblings –– by day amongst the pickle-vats, by night within these sheets, I spend my time at the great work of preserving. Memory, as well as fruit, is being saved from the corruption of the clocks.

Salman Rushdie

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