At the beginning of their work together Arthur Hibbert gave him a piece of advice he never forgot. “You must never write history,” Hibbert said, “until you can hear the people speak.” He thought about that for years, and in the end it came to feel like a valuable guiding principle for fiction as well. If you didn’t have a sense of how people spoke, you didn’t know them well enough, and so you couldn’t – you shouldn’t – tell their story.

— Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie Quotes

Neela had dressed for beauty, not for warmth, and the afternoon had lost its glow. Solanka took off his coat and put it over her trembling shoulders. All around them in the park the colours were fading. The world became a place of blacks and greys. Women’s clothes – unusually for New York, it had been a season of bright colours – faded to monochrome. Under a gunmetal sky, the green leached out of the spreading trees.

— Salman Rushdie

The true story is there’s no true story any more. There’s no true any more that anyone can agree on.

— Salman Rushdie

When ninety-nine percent of people thought the world was flat,” Evel said, “it didn’t make the world flat. The world didn’t need people to believe it was round to be round. Right now, ninety-nine percent of people are happily having a picnic on a railway track. Which doesn’t mean there isn’t a train coming down the line, traveling pretty fast. The railway train doesn’t need people to believe it’s coming, because it’s coming.

— Salman Rushdie

And the most gladdening thing was the discovery that even the unforgivable crime of being one’s father could be forgiven, after all, in the end.

— Salman Rushdie

I am comparing gravity with belonging... Both phenomena observably exist... but neither is understood... We know the force of gravity but not its origins; and to explain how we become attached to our birth places we pretend that we are trees and speak of roots. Look under your feet. You will not find gnarled growths sprouting through the soles. Roots, I sometimes think, are a conservative myth, designed to keep us in our places. – from “Home” and “Shame.

— Salman Rushdie

And because the stories were held here in fluid form, they retained the ability to change, to become new versions of themselves, to join up with other stories and so become yet other stories; so that unlike a library of books, the Ocean of the Streams of Story was much more than a storeroom of yarns. It was not dead but alive.

— Salman Rushdie

Perhaps we, who are language animals, possess a song and story instinct; we need and move toward stories and songs not because we are taught to do so but because it is in our nature to need them.

— Salman Rushdie

Crisis shines a very bright light on human behavior, leaves no shadows in which we can hide, and reveals, simultaneously, the worst of which we are capable and our better natures.

— Salman Rushdie

Let’s face it: it was impossible for them to have heard one another, much less conversed and also competed thus in song. Accelerating towards the planet, atmosphere roaring around them, how could they? But let’s face this, too: they did.

— Salman Rushdie

An old, secret pain welled up in him, begging for healing.

— Salman Rushdie

Fictions could be as powerful as histories, revealing the new people to themselves, allowing them to understand their own natures and the natures of those around them, and making them real.

— Salman Rushdie

Fictions could be as powerful as histories, revealing the new people to themselves, allowing them to understand their own natures and the natures of those around them, and making them real. This was the paradox of the whispered stories: they were no more than make-believe but they created the truth, and brought into being a city and an army with all the rich diversity of nonfictional people with deep roots in the actually existing world.

— Salman Rushdie

For the rest of his life that was what he said to anyone who asked – and there were people who asked, because the world is a cynical and suspicious place and, being full of liars, thinks of everything as a lie. Which is what Vidyasagar’s story was.

— Salman Rushdie

On this day Bisnaga moves out of the realm of the fantastic into that of the historical, and the great river of its story flows into the ocean of stories which is the history of the world.

— Salman Rushdie

This is how history moves; the obsession of one moment is relegated to the junkyard of oblivion by the next.

— Salman Rushdie

In death do triumph and failure humbly meet. We learn far less from victory than from defeat.

— Salman Rushdie

Water creates love more easily than victory.

— Salman Rushdie

Maybe this is what human history was: the brief illusion of happy victories set in a long continuum of bitter, disillusioning defeats.

— Salman Rushdie

As we will see, it did not succeed. In this way Pampa learned the lesson every creator must learn, even God himself. Once you had created your characters, you had to be bound by their choices. You were no longer free to remake them according to your own desires.

— Salman Rushdie

If you start reading a book and you don’t like it you always have the option of shutting it. At this point it loses its capacity to offend you.

— Salman Rushdie
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