Salman Rushdie Quotes

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.

What follows is more about books than it is about me, but nonetheless it is my inward autobiography, for the words we take into ourselves help to shape us.

I think once you sort of cross over and you realize what books can be - and if they mean something to you - there's just no stopping you.

A truly good book attracts very little favor to itself. It is so true that it teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down and commence living on its hint. When I read an indifferent book, it seems the best thing I can do, but the inspiring volume hardly leaves me leisure to finish its latter pages. It is slipping out of my fingers while I read. It creates no atmosphere in which it may be perused, but one in which its teachings may be practiced. It confers on me such wealth that I lay it down with regret. What I began by reading I must finish by acting.

As a kid books changed how I looked at the world and helped me understand things. Books still deepen me and open my heart.

The process of writing a book is infinitely more important than the book that is completed as a result of the writing, let alone the success or failure that book may have after it is written . . . the book is merely a symbol of the writing. In writing the book, I am living. I am growing. I am tapping myself. I am changing. The process is the product.

I love the way that each book -- any book -- is its own journey. You open it, and off you go. You are changed in some way, large or small, by having traveled with those characters.

Poetry can startle you, awaken you, make you fall in love, take your breath away. When those words sink in, you'll never look at your life or your journey the same way again.

We don't simply read books. We become them.

A book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul.

Reading has made such a profound difference to my life. I'm sure I became a writer because of the power of literature in my own life.

Books help to form us. If you cut me open, you will find volume after volume, page after page, the contents of every one I have ever read, somehow transmuted and transformed into me just as my genes and the soul within me make me uniquely me, so I am the unique sum of the books I have read. I am my literary DNA.

When I closed THE GRAPES OF WRATH, I was a different man. It enriched my powers of thinking and discipline, and my relationships. I left prison more informed than when I went in. And the more informed you are, the less arrogant and aggressive you are.

There are books which we read early in life, which sink into our consciousness and seem to disappear without leaving a trace. And then one day we find, in some summing-up of our life and put attitudes towards experience, that their influence has been enormous.

Growing up, I took so many cues from books. They taught me most of what I knew about what people did, about how to behave. They were my teachers and my advisers.

That book taught me that by reading, I could live more intensely. It could give me back the sight I had lost. For that reason alone, a book that didn't matter to anyone changed my life.

I look at you looking at me, Now I know why the best things are free, How you've changed my world You'll never know, I'm different now, You've helped me grow.

A change of heart is the essence of all other change, and it has brought about me a reeducation of the mind.

Change your attitude and gain some altitude. Believe me, you'll love it up here.

The change is from inner to outer. We start by dissolving our attitude not by altering outer conditions.

Before entering the seminary, I had not encountered the life-changing potential of reading as a source of meaning, as a way of ordering one's inner life, and being rooted in the world.

A book should be an axe to chop open the frozen sea inside us.

Everything that is printed and bound in a book contains some echo at least of the best that is in literature.

Perspective. You start looking at things differently, like everything's not so important. You don't take things so personally. Everyone changes, becomes better people. We all should get that chance.