Salman Rushdie

The people suffering most from the Taliban were Afghans.

— Salman Rushdie

“You be respectable, sister,” she said, “Me, I’ll be alive.”

— Salman Rushdie

If you have children, you worry about the world you're leaving them.

— Salman Rushdie

“I had learned that secrets were not always a bad thing.”

— Salman Rushdie

“Human beings who turn away from God lose love, and certainty,”

— Salman Rushdie

No story comes from nowhere; new stories are born from old.

— Salman Rushdie

We crave permission openly to become our secret selves.

— Salman Rushdie

What's the use of stories that aren't even true?

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

Nobody wants to read a 600 page book in which the author is fabulous throughout.

— Salman Rushdie

Everybody loves 'The Wire,' and I think it's okay, but in the end it's just a police series.

— Salman Rushdie

And so it is they who, between them, give me all the reasons for believing in none.

— Salman Rushdie

It's Kennedy's war, Vietnam. Lyndon Johnson got all the flak, but it's Kennedy's war.

— Salman Rushdie

I've never read anything so badly written that got published. It made 'Twilight' look like 'War and Peace.'

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

“a person must sometimes choose what he will see and what he will not; look away, look away from there now.”

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

“What shuts you up is, I think, the sight you've had of perfection: why speak if you can't manage perfect thoughts, perfect…

— Salman Rushdie

I don't read my books, I write them. Once I've finished the many years it usually takes me to write them, I…

— Salman Rushdie

I always thought storytelling was like juggling [...] You keep a lot of different tales in the air, and juggle them up…

— Salman Rushdie

Games sometimes require lateral thinking. They sometimes require quite skilled hand-eye coordination and so on. But they're not in any sense intelligent…

— Salman Rushdie

“You'll say things all wrong but they'll at once become American ways of saying things. You won't know shit but it'll right…

— Salman Rushdie

“Shah Ismail had fallen victim to the rarely used, great Uzbek anti-Shiite potato and sturgeon curse, which required quantities of potatoes and…

— Salman Rushdie

“Say we are from nowhere or anywhere or somewhere, we are make-believe people, frauds, reinventions, shapeshifters, which is to say, Americans.”

— Salman Rushdie

“He was learning that to win a fight like this, it was not enough to know what one was fighting against. That…

— Salman Rushdie

“He did not wish to be divine. If there had never been a God, the emperor thought, it might have been easier…

— Salman Rushdie

“The city of Jahilia is built entirely of sand, its structures formed of the desert whence it rises. It is a sight…

— Salman Rushdie

“to admit we do not understand a phenomenon is not to admit the presence of the miraculous but merely, reasonably, to accept…

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

“I was born in the city of Bombay ... once upon a time. No, that won't do, there's no getting away from…

— Salman Rushdie

“Atata timp cat esti anesteziat si nu iti simti tragedia propriei vieti, poti supravietui. Cand iti revine limpezimea, cand iti este meticulos…

— Salman Rushdie

“Also – for there had been more than a few migrants aboard, yes, quite a quantity of wives who had been grilled…

— Salman Rushdie

If you're offended, it's your problem.

— Salman Rushdie

“Pandora, possessed by the unleashed contents of her box.”

— Salman Rushdie

Between the adored and the adorer falls the shadow.

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

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

— Salman Rushdie

What kind of Christmas present would Jesus ask Santa for?

— Salman Rushdie

Life is lived forward but is judged in reverse.

— Salman Rushdie

In the movies, the writer is just the servant, the employee.

— Salman Rushdie