Salman Rushdie Quotes

Once a refugee, always a refugee. I can't ever remember not being all right wherever I was, but you don't give your whole allegiance to a place or want to be entirely identified with the society you're living in.

I'm a refugee from the past, and like other refugees I go over the customs and habits of being I've left or been forced to leave behind me, and it all seems just as quaint, from here, and I am just as obsessive about it.

Uprootedness uproots everything except the need for roots.

My father is from Newark in Nottinghamshire and my mother is from the very north of Ireland. They've ended up in Scotland, where my father - well, both of them - will always be seen as having come from somewhere else.

I'd always somehow felt slightly as if I'd been born in the wrong country.

I grew up in a Mauritian bubble in France... I had the feeling of not belonging, but still living with French culture.

A thing that happens to migrants is that they lose many of the traditional things which root identity, which root the self.

Every time someone asks me where I'm from, I'm not sure how to answer that question... so I say I have no roots.

I see myself as a transient, not an immigrant.

Unfortunately, I think I drifted so much growing up that I don't have a strong sense of identity. I don't feel at home anywhere, and because of that, I think I'm more of a chameleon.

I knew that I would have to leave Venezuela in order to figure out who I was.

No, not under the vault of another sky, not under the shelter of other wings. I was with my people then, there where my people were doomed to be.

I realized that I might be a lonely Indian boy, but I was not alone in the loneliness. There were millions of other Americans who had left their birthplaces in search of a dream. (217)

Every immigrant family, it seems, has someone who does not belong in the new country they have come to. It feels like permanent exile to that one brother or wife who cannot stand a silent fate in Boston or London or Melbourne. I’ve met many who remain haunted by the persistent ghost of an earlier place.

No one in this country has any root anywhere; we don't live in America, we board here, we are like spiders that run over the surface of the water.

I speak only one language, and it is not my own.

It is more than their land that you take away from the people, whose native land you take. It is their past as well, their roots and their identity. If you take away the things that they have been used to see and will be expecting to see, you may, in a way, as well take their eyes.

When you come back to a country that you've left, you're in a very peculiar situation because, in a way, you don't belong to that country any more, even though when I'm in America I feel I don't belong there either.

What was the use of my having come from Oakland it was not natural to have come from there yes write about it if I like or anything if I like but not there, there is no there there.

When you move around a lot, there are little bits of you from everywhere. I mean, my father's French, and I speak French, and there's a kind of struggle in me that says, 'I'd like to be French.' But I've never been fully part of that culture, that role.

From the beginnings of literature, poets and writers have based their narratives on crossing borders, on wandering, on exile, on encounters beyond the familiar. The stranger is an archetype in epic poetry, in novels. The tension between alienation and assimilation has always been a basic theme.

When you live in a country where your own language is considered foreign, you can feel a continuous sense of estrangement. You speak a secret, unknown language, lacking any correspondence to the environment. An absence that creates a distance within you.

Language, identity, place, home: these are all of a piece - just different elements of belonging and not-belonging.

I had quite a scattered childhood. I was Irish in London, because I had my secondary school education there. I never really fitted anywhere. I didn't feel it was a negative thing, and I was never made to feel different - I just knew I was.

Ever since I was little, when I moved to Canada, Canada has been my home.