Skip to content

People Quotes by Salman Rushdie

100 People quotes by Salman Rushdie

All People quotes Salman Rushdie’s page

Meaning is built from bits of dogmas, childhood hurts, and random remarks, according to Rushdie. He argues that free speech must protect even the voices we find offensive, and that cowardice often comes from fear rather than respect. He also notes that confronting death can make us think more about our own vulnerability.

Rate this collection: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ No ratings yet

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

Image

The people suffering most from the Taliban were Afghans.

Image

Hell is other people's fantasies.

Image

I do not envy people who think they have a complete explanation of the world, for the simple reason that they are…

Image

In a novel, if you're any good, you don't just have good people or bad people. You have complicated people. You have…

Image

People are always telling me that they've seen people reading my books on the subway, or the beach, or whenever.

Image

Free speech is not just free speech for people you admire. It's also for people who you think of as reprehensible.

Image

When people do the cowardly thing, it's not about respect, it's about fear.

Image

The reason why books endure is because there are enough people who like them. It's the only reason why books last.

Image

Rock and roll music - the music of freedom frightens people and unleashes all manner of conservative defense mechanisms.

Image

Sometimes people have said that Islam, in its own calendar, is still only in the Middle Ages.

Image

I think people direct good films when they feel personal to them, not because it's a famous book or something. It has…

Image

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

Image

There is nothing intrinsic linking any religion with any act of violence. The crusades don't prove that Christianity was violent. The Inquisition…

Image

The interesting thing about history sometimes. is that you know these people existed, and you knew what jobs they did, but you…

Image

What happened in Pakistan was that people were told: You're all Muslim, so now you're a country. As we saw in 1971…

Image

People can do bad things with free speech as well as good. You have to defend the Ku Klux Klan as well…

Image

War used to be something you could stand on the nearby hill and watch. Now we have total war; everybody's in it.…

Image

Very often, people who actually pick up a book of mine for the first time are kind of surprised. And I get…

Image

One of the strange things about violent and authoritarian regimes is they don't like the glare of negative publicity. If you can…

Image

I suppose authoritarians don't like being made fun of because authoritarian rulers have a very inflated sense of themselves and don't like…

Image

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

Image

I was living in New York at the time of the 9/11 attacks. And I remember, you know, in those weeks that…

Image

I don't think it is always necessary to take up the anti-colonial -- or is it post-colonial? -- cudgels against English. What…

Image

Meaning is a shaky edifice we build out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old fillms, small victories, people…

Image

I think, in a written novel, the way in which you play with the readers' emotion or the way in which you…

Image

It seems to me it's perfectly possible to vehemently disagree with a piece of work and to say that it's offensive and…

Image

In our time, we have become too interested in the artist and his or her character and experience as a way of…

Image

The desire for story is very, very deep in human beings. We are the only creature in the world that does this;…

Image

In Europe, the Enlightenment of the 18th century was seen as a battle against the desire of the Church to limit intellectual…

Image

One of the problems of truth being censored for a really long time is that people lose the ability to intuit what…

Image

You've got a generation of young men - almost all are young men - in situations of great economic hardship, where they…

Image

The world is full of things that upset people. But most of us deal with it and move on and don't try…

Image

Things, even people have a way of leaking into each other like flavours when you cook.

Image

I don't think people cry reading 'Midnight's Children,' but a lot of people seem to cry watching the movie.

Image

“The only people who see the whole picture are the ones who step outside the frame.”

Image

The frustrating part of being tagged 'controversial' is people go looking for trouble where there isn't any to look for.

Image

Sometimes, people trying to commit suicide manage it in a manner that leaves them breathless with astonishment.

Image

Sometimes you find your voice by trying to write like people, and sometimes you find it by trying to write unlike people.

Image

I accept there are people out there who don't like me. I don't like them.

Image

Other authors on People

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…