Shame is like everything else; live with it for long enough and it becomes part of the furniture.
Salman Rushdie
Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.
Salman Rushdie
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.
Salman Rushdie
One of the extraordinary things about human events is that the unthinkable becomes thinkable.
Salman Rushdie
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
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.
Salman Rushdie
A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return.
Salman Rushdie
I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine.
Salman Rushdie
The liveliness of literature lies in its exceptionality, in being the individual, idiosyncratic vision of one human being, in which, to our delight and great surprise, we may find our own vision reflected.
Salman Rushdie
Names, once they are in common use, quickly become mere sounds, their etymology being buried, like so many of the earth’s marvels, beneath the dust of habit.
Salman Rushdie
Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems – but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible.
Salman Rushdie
The novel does not seek to establish a privileged language but it insists upon the freedom to portray and analyze the struggle between the different contestants for such privileges.
Salman Rushdie
I have been a swallower of lives; and to know me, just the one of me, you’ll have to swallow the lot as well.
Salman Rushdie
I do not envy people who think they have a complete explanation of the world, for the simple reason that they are obviously wrong.
Salman Rushdie
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
I fell victim to the temptation of every autobiographer, to the illusion that since the past exists only in one’s memories and the words which strive vainly to encapsulate them, it is possible to create past events simply by saying they occurred.
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 acceptance that all that is solid has melted into the air, that reality and morality are not givens but imperfect human constructs, is the point from which fiction begins.
Salman Rushdie
