Salman Rushdie Quotes

Make no mistake- you can change things. Question everything, take nothing for granted; argue with all received ideas, don't respect what does not deserve respect; speak your mind, don't censor yourself; use your imagination and express what it tells you to express. These are the weapons of the mind.

A question I have often asked is, "What would an inoffensive political cartoon look like?" What would a respectful cartoon look like? The form requires disrespect and so if we are going to have in the world things like cartoons and satire, we just have to accept it as part of the price of freedom.

To be born again,' sang Gibreal Farishta tumbling from the heaveans, 'first you have to die. Ho ji! Ho ji! To land upon the bosomy earth, first one needs to fly Tat-taa! Takatun! How to ever smile again, if first you won't cry? How to win the darling's love mister, without a sigh?

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

OK, publishing a book and releasing a movie is all very well, but Tottenham beating Man. U. 3-2... priceless.

You can't judge an internal injury by the size of the hole.

The fact of being alive compensated for what life did to one.

The responsibility for violence lies with those who perpetrate it.

Now I know what a ghost is. Unfinished business, that's what.

Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination and of the heart.

If I seem a little bizarre, remember the wild profusion of my inheritance...perhaps, if one wishes to remain an individual in the midst of the teeming multitudes, one must make oneself grotesque.

William the Conqueror, it is said, began by eating a mouthful of English sand.

We crave permission openly to become our secret selves.

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

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