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Salman Rushdie Quotes |
A photograph is a moral decision taken in one eighth of a second.
Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet
A poet's work... to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep.
Salman Rushdie
A sigh isn't just a sigh. We inhale the world and breathe out meaning. While we can. While we can.
Salman Rushdie, The Moor's Last Sigh
Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.
Salman Rushdie
But love is what we want, not freedom. Who then is the unluckier man? The beloved, who is given his heart's desire and must for ever after fear its loss, or the free man, with his unlooked-for liberty, naked and alone between the captive armies of the earth?
Salman Rushdie
Faith without doubt is addiction
Salman Rushdie
From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable.
Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses
Fundamentalism isn't about religion, it's about power.
Salman Rushdie
How do you defeat terrorism? Don’t be terrorized.
Salman Rushdie
Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true.
Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses
Masks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull.
Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses
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.
Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children
Most of what matters in our lives takes place in our absence.
Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children
?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.
Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children
Not all possibilities are open to us. The world is finite; our hopes spill over its rim.
Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses
Perhaps the story you finish is never the one you begin.
Salman Rushdie
Realism can break a writer's heart.
Salman Rushdie, Shame
The only people who see the whole picture,' he murmured, 'are the ones who step out of the frame.
Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet
The world, somebody wrote, is the place we prove real by dying in it.
Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses
To understand just one life you have to swallow the world ... do you wonder, then, that I was a heavy child?
Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children
Vertigo is the conflict between the fear of falling and the desire to fall.
Salman Rushdie
You can't judge an internal injury by the size of the hole.
Salman Rushdie
We all owe death a life.
Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children
We are the storytelling animal.
Salman Rushdie
We are described into corners, and then we must describe ourselves out of corners.
Salman Rushdie
We crave permission openly to become our secret selves.
Salman Rushdie
What can't be cured must be endured.
Salman Rushdie
What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.
Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children
What's real and what's true aren't necessarily the same.
Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children
When you throw everything up in the air anything becomes possible.
Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses