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Life Quotes by Salman Rushdie

117 Life quotes by Salman Rushdie

All Life quotes Salman Rushdie’s page

A terrible thing that your life turns into a good story. The quotes suggest that understanding a single life can feel like swallowing the whole world, and that our experiences shape who we are. They also hint that travel and performance can strip away meaning, leaving us to wonder about privacy and the value of small, everyday lives.

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“Life again refused to remain lifesized”

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Our lives teach us who we are.

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Life is lived forward but is judged in reverse.

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We all owe death a life.

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Life is elsewhere. Cross frontiers. Fly away.

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Free speech is life itself.

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It's a terrible thing that your life turns into a good story.

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“Life has vanquished death and even the furniture celebrates.”

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In the cookie of life, friends are the chocolate chips.

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“Life's bruises demythologise us all. The earth gapes.”

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“Love is spring after winter. It comes to heal life’s wounds, inflicted by the unloving cold.”

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Our lives are not what we deserve; they are, let us agree, in many ways deficient.

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There is nothing like a War for the reinvention of lives...

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“Honesty is not the best policy in life. Only, perhaps, in art.”

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“said, think of life as a novel, let’s say a novel of four hundred pages, and then imagine how many pages in…

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“..and perhaps by something more; because, in my life, fate has never been unwilling to lend a hand.”

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Respect for religion' has become a code phrase meaning 'fear of religion'. Religions, like all other ideas, deserve criticism, satire, and, yes,…

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I think anyone who knows me at all knows that I have been a movie addict all my life. I grew up…

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What I've always tried to find in my books are points at which the private lives of the characters, and also my…

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“From 'The Suicide', a play by the Russian writer Nikolai Erdman: 'Only the dead can say what the living are thinking.”

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

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I learned: the first lesson of my life: nobody can face the world with his eyes open all the time.

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Our lives disconnect and reconnect, we move on, and later we may again touch one another, again bounce away. This is the…

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Fundamentalists believe that we don't believe in anything. In their view of the world, they are in possession of absolute certainties, while…

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In spite of all evidence that life is discontinuous, a valley of rifts, and that random chance plays a great part in…

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“This was what was left of a human individual when you took away his home,his family, his friends, his city, his country,his…

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Certainly, poverty and economic decline have a lot to do with the so-called rage of Islam. You've got all these young men…

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“...because it is the privilige and the curse of midnight's children to be both masters and victims of their times, to forsake…

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Travel was pointless. It removed you from the place in which you had a meaning, and to which you gave meaning in…

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The history of life was not the bumbling progress - the very English, middle-class progress - Victorian thought had wanted it to…

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“The night in Lonsdale Square was cold, dark, and clear. There were two policemen in the square. When he got out of…

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“This is how people behave when their dailiness is destroyed, when for a few moments they see, plain and unadorned, one of…

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“Even if Shaheed had been able to hear me, I could not then have told him what I later became convinced was…

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What kind of idea are you? Are you the kind that compromises, does deals, accomodates itself to society, aims to find a…

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Abraham Zogoiby covered his face that night in August 1939 because he had been assailed by fear, [...] a sudden apprehension that…

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“Life is fury, he'd thought. Fury — sexual, Oedipal, political, magical, brutal — drives us to our finest heights and coarsest depths.…

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“The Fire Bug flared up at that. “You want to know what bugs me?” it said indignantly. “Nobodaddy’s friendly about fire. Oh,…

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“He told her: he fell from the sky and lived. She took a deep breath and believed him, because of her father's…

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“To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world.”

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

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More by Salman Rushdie

If my child had prejudice in his head, I'd be ashamed. I would see it as my failure as a parent.

It's a terrible thing that your life turns into a good story.

Sometimes by a woodland stream he watched the water rush over the pebbled bed, its tiny modulations of bounce and flow. A woman's body…

I want to write novels. I want to write stories. I want to do the stuff that I became a writer to do.

If you want to be a serious writer, then you have to write what there is to write about. If you're going to pull…

“Después de exigir mi marcha, ya no posees jurisdicción en lo concerniente a mi salud.”

If there is a choice between absolute safety and freedom, then freedom must always prevail.

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…

I'd wanted to create a storm so that I could become more famous and richer.

Who what am I? My answer: I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done,…

“...proving once again that there was no escape from recurrence.”

“information, in a stream-of-consciousness soliloquy that revealed the extent to which he had internalised the adversarial fragmentation of American culture and made it a…

A little bit of one story joins onto an idea from another, and hey presto, . . . not old tales but new ones.…

I'm a novelist. Fortunately I don't have to rule the world.

The First Amendment defends all forms of speech including hate speech, which is why groups like Ku Klux Klan are allowed to utter their…