Salman Rushdie Quotes About Language

Quotes about: Language

• Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true.

  Salman Rushdie

  Courage, Communication, Novelists

  Salman Rushdie (1989). “The Satanic Verses”, New York, N.Y. : Viking

• In India, as elsewhere in our darkening world, religion is the poison in the blood. Where religion intervenes, mere innocence is no excuse. Yet we go on skating around this issue, speaking of religion in the fashionable language of 'respect.' What is there to respect in any of this, or in any of the crimes now being committed almost daily around the world in religion's dreaded name?

  Salman Rushdie

  Issues, Blood, World Religions

  "Religion, as ever, is the poison in India's blood" by Salman Rushdie, www.theguardian.com. March 8, 2002.

• We were language's magpies by nature, stealing whatever sounded bright and shiny.

  Salman Rushdie

  Language, Stealing, Magpies

  Salman Rushdie (2000). “The Ground Beneath Her Feet: A Novel”, p.56, Macmillan

• What had been (at the beginning) no bigger than a full stop had expanded into a comma, a word, a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter; now it was bursting into more complex developments, becoming, one might say, a book - perhaps an encylopaedia - even a whole language.

  Salman Rushdie

  Book, Becoming One, Development

  Salman Rushdie (2010). “Midnight's Children”, p.133, Random House

• If you want to tell the untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you've got to find a language. Which goes for film as well as prose, for documentary as well as autobiography. Use the wrong language, and you're dumb and blind.

  Salman Rushdie

  Voice, Giving, Dumb

• The novel does not seek to establish a privileged language but it insists upon the freedom to portray and analyze the struggle between the different contestants for such privileges.

  Salman Rushdie

  Freedom, Struggle, Doe

  Salman Rushdie (1990). “Is nothing sacred?”, Penguin (Non-Classics)

• The only privilege literature deserves - and this privilege it requires in order to exist - is the privilege of being in the arena of discourse, the place where the struggle of our languages can be acted out.

  Salman Rushdie

  Struggle, Order, Literature

• Only the foolish, blinded by language's conventions, think of fire as red or gold. Fire is blue at it's melancholy rim, green in it's envious heart. It may burn white, or even, in it's greatest rages, black.

  Salman Rushdie

  Heart, Thinking, Fire

• Language upon a silvered tongue affords enchantment enough.

  Salman Rushdie

  Enchantment, Tongue, Language

  Salman Rushdie (2008). “The Enchantress of Florence”, p.75, Random House

• He had picked up languages the way most sailors pick up diseases; languages were his gonorrhoea, his syphilis, his scurvy, his ague, his plague.

  Salman Rushdie

  Disease, Syphilis, Way

• Khattam-Shud,' he said slowly, 'is the Arch-Enemy of all Stories, even of language itself. He is the Prince of Silence and the Foe of Speech. And because everything ends, because dreams end, stories end, life ends, at the finish of everything we use his name. "It's finished," we tell one another, "it's over. Khattam-Shud: The End.

  Salman Rushdie

  Dream, Names, Silence

  Salman Rushdie (1990). “Haroun and the Sea of Stories”, Penguin Books

• When I was growing up, everyone around me was fond of fooling around with words. It was certainly common in my family, but I think it is typical of Bombay, and maybe of India, that there is a sense of play in the way people use language.

  Salman Rushdie

  Growing Up, Thinking, Play

  Salon Interview, www.salon.com. January 27, 1996.

• And at the end of the day, there was an attempt to suppress a book. The book wasn't suppressed. It's freely available in whatever it is, close to 50 languages. There was an attempt to suppress the writer. And I'm happy to say the writer wasn't suppressed.

  Salman Rushdie

  Book, The End Of The Day, Language

  "In 'Joseph Anton,' Salman Rushdie Writes Novelistically About His Own Life". "PBS NewsHour" with Jeffrey Brown, www.pbs.org. October 7, 2012.

• I don't think I've ever quite grown out of it, actually. There was a point where I could recite some of those Elvish verses - which I've mercifully forgotten. But I can still, if really pushed, recite the text of the inside of the ruling ring in the language of Mordor.

  Salman Rushdie

  Thinking, Language, Forgotten

• If you listen to the urban speech patterns there you'll find it's quite characteristic that a sentence will begin in one language, go through a second language and end in a third. It's the very playful, very natural result of juggling languages. You are always reaching for the most appropriate phrase.

  Salman Rushdie

  India, Phrases, Speech

  "Salman Rushdie". Salon Interview, www.salon.com. January 28, 1996.

• I don't think it is always necessary to take up the anti-colonial -- or is it post-colonial? -- cudgels against English. What seems to me to be happening is that those people who were once colonized by the language are now rapidly remaking it, domesticating it, becoming more and more relaxed about the way they use it -- assisted by the English language's enormous flexibility and size, they are carving out large territories for themselves within its frontiers.

  Salman Rushdie

  Thinking, People, Use

• I discovered that if you find the language to talk to younger readers, children can accept anything.

  Salman Rushdie

  Children, Language, Accepting

• What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist. Without the freedom to challenge, even to satirize all orthodoxies, it ceases to exist. Language and the imagination cannot be imprisoned, or art will die, and with it, a little of what makes us human.

  Salman Rushdie

  Art, Expression, Imagination

  Salman Rushdie (1990). “In good faith”, Penguin (Non-Classics)

• English, no longer an English language, now grows from many roots.

  Salman Rushdie

  Roots, Language, English Language

  The Times (London), July 3, 1982.

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