Your songs are your planets. Live on them but make no home there.
SALMAN RUSHDIE, The Ground Beneath Her Feet
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, speech, Feb. 6, 1990
With death comes honesty.
SALMAN RUSHDIE, The Satanic Verses
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.
SALMAN RUSHDIE, London Independent, Feb. 18, 1989
Shame is like everything else; live with it for long enough and it becomes part of the furniture.
Doubt, it seems to me, is the central condition of a human being in the twentieth century.
SALMAN RUSHDIE, London Observer, Feb. 19, 1989
Live on, survive, for the earth gives forth wonders. It may swallow your heart, but the wonders keep on coming. You stand before them bareheaded, shriven. What is expected of you is attention.
SALMAN RUSHDIE, The Ground Beneath Her Feet
Literature is the one place in any society where, within the secrecy of our own heads, we can hear voices talking about everything in every possible way.
SALMAN RUSHDIE, speech, Feb. 6, 1990
Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts.
SALMAN RUSHDIE, Midnight's Children
- How does newness come into the world? How is it born?
- Of what fusions, translations, conjoinings is it made?
- How does it survive, extreme and dangerous as it is? What compromises, what deals, what betrayals of its secret nature must it make to stave off the wrecking crew, the exterminating angel, the guillotine?
- Is birth always a fall?
- Do angels have wings? Can men fly?
SALMAN RUSHDIE, The Satanic Verses
Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.
SALMAN RUSHDIE, London Independent, Feb. 4, 1990
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 incredible.
SALMAN RUSHDIE, Midnight's Children
Throughout human history, the apostles of purity, those who have claimed to possess a total explanation, have wrought havoc among mere mixed-up human beings.
SALMAN RUSHDIE, London Independent, Feb. 4, 1990
You can find shame in every house, burning in an ashtray, hanging framed upon a wall, covering a bed. But nobody notices it any more.
I hate admitting that my enemies have a point.
SALMAN RUSHDIE, The Satanic Verses
If I do have a kind of moral view of the world, which I suppose I do, I should come clean and admit that I do, it's trying to construct for myself, a sense of the spiritual life of human beings which doesn't rely on outside validation. Which doesn't rely on some moral absolute like a god or a devil or a holy book. But which tries to create -- what I'm trying to do for myself is work out a set of spiritual values and a way of thinking about the spiritual life of people which is internal. Which says that we all have that inside us, you don't need to go outside to look for the divine. Nor for the demonic.
SALMAN RUSHDIE, Conversations With Salman Rushdie
Freedom to reject is the only freedom.
SALMAN RUSHDIE, The Ground Beneath Her Feet
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, speech, Feb. 6, 1990
After a long, hopeless war, people will settle for peace, at almost any price.
SALMAN RUSHDIE, preface, The Jaguar Smile
Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.
SALMAN RUSHDIE, London Guardian, Nov. 8, 1990
Life is elsewhere. Cross frontiers. Fly away.
SALMAN RUSHDIE, The Ground Beneath Her Feet
The moment you say that any idea system is sacred, whether it's a religious belief system or a secular ideology, the moment you declare a set of ideas to be immune from criticism, satire, derision, or contempt, freedom of thought becomes impossible.
SALMAN RUSHDIE, "Do We Have to Fight the Battle for the Enlightenment all Over Again?"
How do you defeat terrorism? Don't be terrorized.
SALMAN RUSHDIE, Step Across This Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992-2002
When you throw everything up in the air anything becomes possible.
SALMAN RUSHDIE, The Satanic Verses
Realism can break a writer's heart.
SALMAN RUSHDIE, Shame
I must cling with all my might to my own soul; must hold on to its mischievous, iconoclastic, out-of-step clown-instincts, no matter how great the storm.
SALMAN RUSHDIE, speech at Columbia University, December 1991
Now I know what a ghost is. Unfinished business, that's what.
SALMAN RUSHDIE, The Satanic Verses
The power of art to outlast tyranny is very great. Authoritarian regimes may, for a short time, control the present, but we control the future. And that's what we have to remember -- that we have to keep creating that work that will tell the future what the present is like.
SALMAN RUSHDIE, "Rushdie Emphasizes the 'Power of Art to Outlast Tyranny'", Princeton Alumni Weekly, May 11, 2017
Our lives teach us who we are.
SALMAN RUSHDIE, London Independent, Feb. 4, 1990
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