A poet’s work,’ he answers. ‘To name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep.’ And if rivers of blood flow from the cuts his verses inflict, then they will nourish him. He is the satirist, Baal.

— Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie Quotes

Murder is a crime of violence against the murdered person. Suicide is a crime of violence against those who remain alive.

— Salman Rushdie

It is hard for a person of no faith like myself to comprehend the moment when faith dies in the human heart. The kneeling believer who suddenly understands that there is no reason to pray because nobody’s listening.

— Salman Rushdie

He stared into the fast-flowing waters and contemplated the tragedy of desire.

— Salman Rushdie

Maybe, according to my insula, this is the way things are these days in America: that for some of us, the world stopped making sense. Anything can happen. Here can be there, then can be now, up can be down, truth can be lies. Everything’s slip-sliding around and there’s nothing to hold on to. The whole thing has come apart at the seams.

— Salman Rushdie

When he was young, he told her, each phase of his life, each self he tried on, had seemed reassuringly temporary. Its imperfections didn’t matter, because he could easily replace one moment by the next, one Saladin by another.

— Salman Rushdie

Then she found him. – And maybe he’d invented her, too, a little bit, invented someone worth rushing out of one’s old life to love. – Nothing so remarkable in that. Happens often enough; and the two inventors go on, rubbing the rough edges off one another, adjusting their inventions, moulding imagination to actuality, learning how to be together; or not. It works out or it doesn’t.

— Salman Rushdie

Are you alcoholic?” it read. “We can help. Call this number for liquor home delivery.

— Salman Rushdie

The system is corrupt,” a young man on a bicycle shouted, “and if it cannot be changed it must be destroyed. The mastodon revolution is here and you must all choose which side of history you want to be on.

— Salman Rushdie

It’s as if we’re standing still and the world is traveling past us. Or maybe the world is TV and I don’t know who’s in charge of the zapper.

— Salman Rushdie

Some migrants are happy to depart.

— Salman Rushdie

Thirteen-year-old Salahuddin, setting aside recent doubts and grievances, entered once again his childish adoration of his father, because he had, had, had worshipped him, he was a great father until you started growing a mind of your own, and then to argue with him was called a betrayal of his love, but never mind that now, I accuse him of becoming my supreme being, so that what happened was like a loss of faith.

— Salman Rushdie

Politics, children: at the best of times a bad dirty business. We should have avoided it, I should never have dreamed of purpose, I am coming to the conclusion that privacy, the small individual lives of men, are preferable to all this inflated macrocosmic activity. But too late. Can’t be helped. What can’t be cured must be endured.

— Salman Rushdie

Faced with the possibility that evil existed, that pure malevolence had walked into my life and convinced me it was love, faced with the loss of everything I wanted from my life, I fainted. And dreamed dark dreams of blood.

— Salman Rushdie

His father said to him: ‘See now. You pay your way. I’ve made a man of you.’ But what man That’s what fathers never know. Not in advance. Not until it’s too late.

— Salman Rushdie

Guns were alive in America, and death was their random gift.

— Salman Rushdie

To be born again, first you have to die.

— Salman Rushdie

Maybe I should go home. I miss Bombay. But the Bombay I miss isn’t there to go home to anymore. This is who we are. We sail away from the place we love and then because we aren’t there to love it people go with axes and burning torches and smash and burn and then we say, Oh, too sad. But we abandoned it, left it to our barbarian successors to destroy.

— Salman Rushdie

It felt as if a thing that had been impossible had become possible, a thing that had been unthinkable had become thinkable, and Luka did not want to give that terrifying thing a name.

— Salman Rushdie

And my chutneys and kasaundies are, after all, connected to my nocturnal scribblings –– by day amongst the pickle-vats, by night within these sheets, I spend my time at the great work of preserving. Memory, as well as fruit, is being saved from the corruption of the clocks.

— Salman Rushdie

Unnerved by Miss Salma R’s temporal absolutism, the clocks gave up arguing and stopped trying to run the hours in the normal fashion, so that when people looked in their direction to see what the time was, the clocks showed them whatever time they wanted it to be, and in spite of the chronometric havoc that was created by this abdication they still permitted everyone to get home on time.

— Salman Rushdie
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