Knife Salman Rushdie Quotes

Art is not a luxury. It stands at the essence of our humanity, and it asks for no special protection except the right to exist.

we would not be who we are today without the calamities of our yesterdays.

When Death comes very close to you, the rest of the world goes far away and you can feel a great loneliness. At such a time kind words are comforting and strengthening.

Waiting is thinking, and to think deeply is, very often, to change one’s mind.

This is who we are as a species: We contain within ourselves both the possibility of murdering an old stranger for almost no reason—the capacity in Shakespeare’s Iago which Coleridge called “motiveless Malignity”—and we also contain the antidote to that disease—courage, selflessness, the willingness to risk oneself to help that old stranger lying on the ground.

His courage is a consequence of who he is.

An intimacy of strangers. That's a phrase I've sometimes used to express the joyful thing that happens in the act of reading, that happy union of the interior lives of author and reader.

So my first thought when I saw this murderous shape rushing toward me was: So it’s you. Here you are.

Something strange has happened to the idea of privacy in our surreal time. Instead of being cherished, it appears to have become, a valueless quality—actually undesirable. If a thing is not made public, it doesn’t really exist. Your dog, your wedding, your beach, your baby, your dinner, the interesting meme you recently saw—these things need, on a daily basis, to be shared. Where attention has become the thing most hungered for, where the quest for followers and likes is the new gluttony, privacy has become unnecessary, unwanted, even absurd.

I have always believed that love is a force, that in its most potent form it can move mountains. It can change the world.

To have a room of one’s own, one must have money. (I don’t think Virginia Woolf ever went to India, but her dictum stands, even there, even for men.)

I don’t usually think of my books as prophecies. I’ve had some trouble with prophets in my life, and I’m not applying for the job.

However, as the attentive reader will have guessed, I survived.

Happiness writes in white ink on white pages. In other words, you can’t make it appear on the page. It’s invisible.

The most important of these things is that art challenges orthodoxy

During those empty, sleepless nights, I thought a lot about The Knife as an idea. A knife was a tool, and acquired meaning from the use we made of it. Language, too, was a knife. I could cut open the world and reveal its meaning, its inner workings, its secrets, its truths. It could cut through from one reality to another. It could call bullshit, open people's eyes, create beauty. Language was my knife. If I had unexpectedly been caught in an unwanted knife fight, maybe this was the knife I could use to fight back.

To regret what your life has been is the true folly, I told myself, because the person doing the regretting has been shaped by the life he subsequently regrets.

A person filled with gumption doesn’t sit around dissipating and stewing about things. He’s at the front of the train of his own awareness, watching to see what’s up the track and meeting it when it comes.

But as we stood there in the stillness I realized that a burden had lifted from me somehow, and the best word I could find for what I was feeling was lightness. A circle had been closed, and I was doing what I had hoped I could do here - I was making my peace with what had happened, making my peace with my life. I stood where I had almost been killed, wearing, I have to tell you, my new Ralph Lauren suit, and I felt... whole.

Children going to school, a congregation in a synagogue, shoppers in a supermarket, a man on the stage of an amphitheater are all, so to speak, inhabiting a stable picture of the world. A school is a place of education. A synagogue is a place of worship. A supermarket is a place to shop. A stage is a performance space. That’s the frame in which they see themselves. Violence smashes that picture. Suddenly they don’t know the rules—what to say, how to behave, what choices to make. They no longer know the shape of things. Reality dissolves and is replaced by the incomprehensible

I had sometimes said, half-humorously, that our sense of a noncorporeal “me” or “I” might mean

I want that on a T-shirt: Fran Lebowitz thinks about me every day

Even better than that: it was a relationship not of competitiveness but of total mutual support. Happiness.

On such coin-toss moments a life can turn. Chance determines our fates at least as profoundly as choice, or those nonexistent notions karma, qismat, “destiny.

Cities' stories were my story too, and here again was my preferred ocean, this story-sea of concrete and steel in which I had always preferred to swim.

This is who we are as a species: We contain within ourselves both the possibility of murdering an old stranger for almost no reason - the capacity in Shakespeare's Iago which Coleridge called "motiveless Malignity" - and we also contain the antidote to that disease - courage, selflessness, the willingness to risk oneself to help that old stranger lying on the ground.

America, what happened to your optimism, your new frontiers, your simple Rockwell dreams? I'm plunging into your night, America, pushing myself deep into your heart like a knife, but the blade of my weapon is hope.

This is perhaps the inevitable way of the world when the love being born is not first love, not young love, not innocent, but following upon hard experience. Be careful, the world admonishes us. Don’t get hurt again.

I have no need of commandments, popes, or god-men of any sort to hand down my morals to me. I have my own ethical sense, thank you very much. God did not hand down morality to us. We created God to embody our moral instincts.

had left this busy sanctuary nineteen days ago and been trapped in a paradox: almost killed in the misleadingly peaceful gentleness of one distant place, and then saved in another faraway neighborhood of unsafe streets. Every minute of my time at Hamot I had

We are engaged in a world war of stories—a war between incompatible versions of reality—and we need to learn how to fight it. A tyrant has arisen in Russia and brutality engulfs Ukraine, whose people, led by a satirist turned hero, offer heroic resistance, and are already creating a legend of freedom. The tyrant creates false narratives to justify his assault—the Ukrainians are Nazis, and Russia is menaced by Western conspiracies. He seeks to brainwash his own citizens with such lying stories. Meanwhile, America is sliding back towards the Middle Ages, as white supremacy exerts itself not only over Black bodies, but over women’s bodies too. False narratives rooted in antiquated religiosity and bigoted ideas from hundreds of years ago are used to justify this, and find willing audiences and believers. In India, religious sectarianism and political authoritarianism go hand in hand, and violence grows as democracy dies. Once again, false narratives of Indian history are in play, narratives that privilege the majority and oppress minorities; and these narratives, let it be said, are popular, just as the Russian tyrant’s lies are believed. This, now, is the ugly dailiness of the world. How should we respond? It has been said, I have said it myself, that the powerful may own the present, but writers own the future, for it is through our work, or the best of it at least, the work which endures into that future, that the present misdeeds of the powerful will be judged. But how can we think of the future when the present screams for our attention, and what, if we turn away from posterity and pay attention to this dreadful moment, can we usefully or effectively do? A poem will not stop a bullet. A novel cannot defuse a bomb. Not all our satirists are heroes. But we are not helpless. Even after Orpheus was torn to pieces, his severed head, floating down the river Hebrus, went on singing, reminding us that the song is stronger than death. We can sing the truth and name the liars, we can join in solidarity with our fellows on the front lines and magnify their voices by adding our own to them. Above all, we must understand that stories are at the heart of what’s happening, and the dishonest narratives of oppressors have proved attractive to many. So we must work to overturn the false narratives of tyrants, populists, and fools by telling better stories than they do, stories within which people want to live. The battleground is not only on the battlefield. The stories we live in are contested territories too. Perhaps we can seek to emulate Joyce’s Dedalus, who sought to forge, in the smithy of his soul, the uncreated conscience of his race. We can emulate Orpheus and sing on in the face of horror, and not stop singing until the tide turns, and a better day begins.

She was familiar with a certain type of American crazy. Gun crazy was normal to her, shooting-kids-at-school or putting-on-a-Joker-mask-and-mowing-people-down-in-a-mall or just plain murdering-your-mom-at-breakfast crazy, Second Amendment crazy, that was just the everyday crazy that kept going down and there was nothing you could do about it if you loved freedom; and she understood knife crazy from her younger days in the Bronx, and the knockout-game type of crazy that persuaded young black kids it was cool to punch Jews in the face. She could comprehend drug crazy and politician crazy and Westboro Baptist Church crazy and Trump crazy because those things, they were the American way, but this new crazy was different. It felt 9/11 crazy: foreign, evil.

The most important of these things is that art challenges orthodoxy. To reject or vilify art because it does that is to fail to understand its nature. Art sets the artist's passionate personal vision against the received ideas of its time. Art knows that recieved ideas are the enemies of art, as Flaubert told us in Bouvard and Pecuchet. Cliches are received ideas and so are ideologies, both those which depend on the sanction of invisible sky gods and those which do not. Without art, our ability to think, to see freshly, and to renew our world would wither and die. Art is not a luxury. It stands at the essence of our humanity, and it asks for no special protection except the right to exist. It accepts argument, criticism, even rejection. It does not accept violence.

New York City in the late afternoon, shining in the sunlight. It did my heart good to see it again, its jolies-laides streets both generous and mean, so much talent in the air, so many rats underfoot, its people striding forth in summer shorts, its parks brightened by young girls in flower, its rusting metal bridges, its pinnacles, its terrible road surfaces, its everything-at-once-ness, its inexhaustible abundance, its crowded excess, and construction sites and music everywhere. Home.

I would answer violence with art.

New York City in the late afternoon, shining in the sunlight. It did my heart good to see it again, its jolies-laides streets both generous and mean, so much talent in the air, so many rats underfoot, its people striding forth in summer shorts, its parks brightened by young girls in flower, its rusting metal bridges, its pinnacles, its terrible road surfaces, its everything-at-once-ness, its inexhaustible abundance, its crowded excess, and construction sites and music everywhere. Home. As the ambulette moved through Manhattan

In India, in the aftermath of the bloodbath of the Partition massacres that spread across the subcontinent at the time of independence from British rule and the creation of the states of India and Pakistan—Hindus massacred by Muslims, Muslims by Hindus, somewhere between one and two million people dead—another group of founding fathers, led by Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, resolved that the only way to ensure peace in India was to remove religion from the public sphere. The new Constitution of India was therefore wholly secular in language and intention, and that has endured until the present moment, when the current administration seeks to undermine those secular foundations, discredit those founders, and create an overtly religious, majoritarian Hindu state.

On such coin-toss moments a life can turn. Chance determines our fates at least as profoundly as choice, or those nonexistent notions karma, qismat, "destiny.

Scarcity creates demand, and in the poor majority of the world, a room of one's own - especially for women - is still a thing to be yearned for. But in the greedy West, where attention has become the thing most hungered for, where the quest for followers and likes is the new gluttony, privacy has become unnecessary, unwanted, even absurd.

forced upon others who do not believe it, or when they believe that nonbelievers should be prevented from the robust or humorous expression of their nonbelief, then there’s a problem. The weaponizing of Christianity in the United States has resulted in the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the ongoing battle over abortion, and women’s right to choose. As I say above, the weaponizing of a kind of radical Hinduism by the current Indian leadership has led to much sectarian trouble, and even violence. And the weaponizing of Islam around the world has led directly to the terror reigns of the Taliban and the ayatollahs, to the stifling society of Saudi Arabia, to the knife attack against Naguib Mahfouz, to the assaults on free thought and the oppression of women in many Islamic states, and, to be personal, to the attack against me.

Dear reader, if you have never had a catheter inserted into your genital organ, do your very best to keep that record intact.

I’ll just say: we would not be who we are today without the calamities of our yesterdays.

When I regained consciousness I was seeing visions. They were architectural. I saw majestic palaces and other grand edifices that were all built out of alphabets. The building blocks of these fantastic structures were letters, as if the world was words, created from the same basic material as language, and poetry. There was no essential difference between things made out of letters and stories, which were made of the same stuff. Their essences were the same. The visions conjured up external walls, great halls, high domes that were both lavish and austere, a Mughal mirror-tiled Sheesh Mahal at one time, and at another a stone-walled place with small barred windows. Something like Hagia Sophia in Istanbul was manifested to me by my unsettled brain, and the Alhambra, and Versailles; like Fatehpur Sikri and the Agra Red Fort and the Lake Palace of Udaipur; but also a darker version of El Escorial in Spain, menacing, puritanical, a nightmare rather than a dream. When I looked closely the alphabets were always present, mirror-glittering alphabets and grim letters of stone, brick alphabets and treasure-letters of diamond and gold. After a while, I understood that my eyes were closed[…]

I wanted to say: I believe that art is a waking dream. And that imagination can bridge the gulf between dreams and reality and allow us to understand the real in new ways by seeing it through the lens of the unreal. No, I don’t believe in miracles, but, yes, my books do, and, to use Whitman’s formulation, do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself. I don’t believe in miracles, but my survival is miraculous. Okay, then. So be it. The reality of my books—oh, call it magic realism if you must—is now the actual reality in which I’m living. Maybe my books had been building that bridge for decades, and now the miraculous could cross it. The magic had become realism. Maybe my books saved my life.

Wanneer religie, een oeroude vorm van redeloosheid, wordt gecombineerd met modern wapentuig, wordt ze een wezenlijke bedreiging van onze vrijheden. Religieus totalitarisme heeft geleid tot een dodelijke mutatie in het hart van de islam en we zien de tragische gevolgen daarvan vandaag in Parijs. Ik sta naast Charlie Hebdo, zoals we allemaal moeten doen, om de kunst van de satire te verdedigen, omdat die altijd een macht vóór vrijheid en tégen tirannie, oneerlijkheid en domheid is geweest. “Respect voor religie” is een code geworden die “angst voor religie” betekent. Religies verdienen, net als andere ideeën, kritiek, satire, en ja, ons onbevreesde gebrek aan respect.

toss moments a life can turn. Chance determines our fates at least as profoundly as choice, or

On such coin-toss moments a life can turn. Chance determines our fates at least as profoundly as choice, or

Imagination can bridge the gulf between dreams and reality and allow us to understand the real in new ways by seeing it through the lens of the unreal.

I dreamed of returning to my beloved Bombay—not Mumbai—and kneeling to kiss the tarmac as I came down from the plane, but when I looked up there was a crowd shouting at me, “Dafa ho.” Begone.

I had nightmares about my eye being pulled out of my head, dreams reminiscent of Un Chien Andalou, the Surrealist film by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, in which a cloud slicing across the full moon becomes a razor blade slicing through an eye” .

The possibility of such an attack had hung over Mahfouz’s head for many years. His novel The Children of Gebelawi (also published under the title Children of the Alley), an allegory set in a poor Cairo alley that describes the birth of the three great monotheisms, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, had been banned for “offending Islam.” At least one firebrand fanatical mullah had declared that Mahfouz deserved to die. An Islamist death list was discovered and he was on it, near the top. But he “doesn’t believe in bodyguards,” his daughter told The New York Times. In his Nobel year, 1988, he was quoted as saying, “I walk to the coffee shop, and I don’t look to the left or the right. And so what if they get me? I have lived my life and done what I wanted to do.”He survived, and lived for another twelve years, with the constant bodyguard protection he had refused earlier. His injuries were such that he could only write for a few minutes a day.I have read that the fatwa against The Satanic Verses, which he had opposed, was the trigger for the attack against him. This is what he had[…]

The most upsetting thing about the attack is that it has turned me once again into somebody I have tried very hard not to be. For more than thirty years I have refused to be defined by the fatwa and insisted on being seen as the author of my books—five before the fatwa and sixteen after it. I had just about managed it. When the last few books were published, people finally stopped asking me about the attack on The Satanic Verses and its author. And now here I am, dragged back into that unwanted subject. I think now I’ll never be able to escape it. No matter what I’ve already written or may now write, I’ll always be the guy who got knifed. The knife defines me. I’ll fight a battle against that, but I suspect I will lose.Living was my victory. But the meaning the knife had given my life was my defeat. In Victory City, my central character, Pampa Kampana, writes a mighty narrative poem in Sanskrit, named Jayaparajaya, meaning “Victory and Defeat.” That could also be the title for the story of my life.

The most important of these things is that art challenges orthodoxy. To reject or vilify art because it does that is to fail to understand its nature. Art sets the artist’s passionate personal vision against the received ideas of its time. Art knows that received ideas are the enemies of art, as Flaubert told us in Bouvard and Pécuchet. Clichés are received ideas and so are ideologies, both those which depend on the sanction of invisible sky gods and those which do not. Without art, our ability to think, to see freshly, and to renew our world would wither and die.Art is not a luxury. It stands at the essence of our humanity, and it asks for no special protection except the right to exist.It accepts argument, criticism, even rejection. It does not accept violence.And in the end, it outlasts those who oppress it. The poet Ovid was exiled by Augustus Caesar, but the poetry of Ovid has outlasted the Roman Empire. The poet Mandelstam’s life was ruined by Joseph Stalin, but his poetry has outlasted the Soviet Union. The poet Lorca was murdered by the thugs of General Franco, but his art has outlasted the fascism of the Falange.

An incel is angry about being a virgin. You’re an angry guy. Six billion enemies, zero friends, zero-plus lovers. Furious. So many resentments. I’m just wondering who you were really trying to kill. Some girl who brushed you off? Some guy at the gym or on the Israeli border? Maybe your mother? That’s what one of my friends thinks, and she’s a lot smarter than me. Was I the proxy murderee? Whose face did you see when you were stabbing me?This conversation is over.No, no. The point about this is, it’s happening in my head, so it’s not over until my head says it is. You don’t even have to think of things to say. I’ll put the words into your mouth.Then they will be worthless.I’m thinking about some other killers who were motivated by religion: the men in the hijacked airplanes on September 11, 2001, and the men in Mumbai murderously attacking the Taj Palace and Oberoi hotels, a Jewish Chabad center, and the much-loved Leopold Café, on November 26, 2008.

After a long silence, I had reactivated my Twitter account to help with the launch of Victory City, retweeting reviews and so on. But Twitter is a poisoned well, and if you dip a bucket into it you draw up your share of filth. When it offered me an Oxford professor’s view that those defending me had a “neoliberal idea of free speech,” I could set that aside with no more than a shrug. But there were also various Muslim voices celebrating what had happened to me, hoping I lost my other eye, and comparing me, in my monocular condition, to the figure of the Dajjal, the one-eyed “false Messiah” of Muslim demonology, who first pretends to be a prophet and later also claims to be God. I stood “revealed,” I was informed, as the Dajjal I truly was. Also, I looked deformed, hideous, like a monster, and so on. It was unnecessary to allow this trash into my head. It had nothing to do with love or work. Happily, without any regrets, I deleted the Twitter app from my phone.

The style, form, and language of any writing project, whether fiction or nonfiction, is determined by the requirements of that project, and can vary from book to book, from the baroque to the stripped-down

In the next months there would be many more such bodily humiliations. In the presence of serious injuries, your body’s privacy ceases to exist, you lose autonomy over your physical self, over the vessel in which you sail. You allow this because you have no alternative. You surrender the captaincy of your ship so that it won’t sink.

A gun’s only way of being in the world was violence;

Who was I? And could I remain myself?

One has to find life, I said. One can’t just sit about recovering from near death. One has to find life.

anger felt like a wasteful luxury