Salman Rushdie Real Quotations

The inevitable triumph of illusion over reality that was the single most obvious truth about the history of the human race.

I have been only the humblest jugglers-with-facts; and that, in a country where the truth is what it is instructed to be, reality quite literally ceases to exist, so that everything becomes possible except what we are told is the case; and maybe this was the difference between my Indian childhood and Pakistani adolescence--that in the first I was beset by an infinity of alternative realities, while in the second I was adrift, disoriented, amid an equally infinite number of falsenesses, unrealities and lies.

The world, somebody wrote, is the place we prove real by dying in it.

Realism can break a writer's heart.

What's real and what's true aren't necessarily the same.

I do not need the idea of God to explain the world I live in.

Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts.

Most of what matters in your life takes place in your absence.

This strange business of what it is to be a writer is this increasingly insane world in which we live, in which surrealism, it seems, is the new realism.

We all dream things into being; you imagine yourself having a child, and then you have a child. An inventor will think of something in his mind and then make it actual. So things are often passing from the imagined realm into the real world.

That's the trouble with you sad-city types: a place has to be miserable and dull as ditchwater before you believe it's real.

A man is sane only to the extent that he subscribes to a previously-agreed construction of reality.

I don't feel American. I do feel like a New Yorker. I think there's a real distinction there. A city allows you to become a citizen even when you're not a national.

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

A relationship with an imaginary woman is preferable to a relationship with a real one.

I beat my sons in real-life table tennis, but virtually, I get murdered. I download games on the iPhone that I'm addicted to - I'm a master at "Angry Birds."

In the real world, immeasurable hurt is caused by terrorists based in Pakistan who attack countries like India.

The real risks for any artist are taken in pushing the work to the limits of what is possible, in the attempt to increase the sum of what it is possible to think. Books become good when they go to this edge and risk falling over it -when they endanger the artist by reason of what he has, or has not, artistically dared.

What I've always seen in writers and artists is the courage it takes to make an original work of art. I think the real risks in literature are linguistic and intellectual, and I hope we can highlight those, as well as political courage.

He knew what he knew: that the real world was full of magic, so magical worlds could easily be real.

When people use the term magic realism, usually they only mean 'magic' and they don't hear 'realism', whereas the way in which magic realism actually works is for the magic to be rooted in the real. It's both things. It's not just a fairytale moment. It's the surrealism that arises out of the real.

The acceptance that all that is solid has melted into the air, that reality and morality are not givens but imperfect human constructs, is the point from which fiction begins.

I think it's a very important function of art to challenge accepted reality, especially when that reality is created by powerful interest groups.

Without water we are nothing", the traveler thought. "Even an emperor, denied water, would swiftly turn to dust. Water is the real monarch and we are all its slaves.

Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems - but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible.

Reality is a question of perspective;

Memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else's version more than his own.

The world is about the way in which our dreams intersect with our real life. Endlessly, the world of the imagination changes the world.

Religion, a medieval form of unreason, when combined with modern weaponry becomes a real threat to our freedoms. This religious totalitarianism has caused a deadly mutation in the heart of Islam and we see the tragic consequences in Paris today.

Religion, a mediaeval form of unreason, when combined with modern weaponry becomes a real threat to our freedoms. This religious totalitarianism has caused a deadly mutation in the heart of Islam and we see the tragic consequences in Paris today. I stand with Charlie Hebdo, as we all must, to defend the art of satire, which has always been a force for liberty and against tyranny, dishonesty and stupidity. 'Respect for religion' has become a code phrase meaning 'fear of religion.' Religions, like all other ideas, deserve criticism, satire, and, yes, our fearless disrespect.