Salman Rushdie Quotes
Salman Rushdie Quotes
Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.
4248Realism can break a writer's heart.
1832 Until you know who you are you can’t write.
2874 No people whose word for 'yesterday' is the same as their word for 'tomorrow' can be said to have a firm grip on the time.
3361 Fury...sexual, Oedipal, political, magical, brutal....drives us to our finest heights and coarsest depths
4751 He knew that his father had finally run hard enough and long enough to wear down the frontiers between the worlds, he had run clear out of his skin and into the arms of his wife, to whom he had proved, once and for all, the superiority of his love. Some migrants are happy to depart.
4112 From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable.
1187 So India’s problem turns out to be the world’s problem. What happened in India has happened in God’s name.
The problem’s name is God.
4050 All true believers have good reasons for disbelieving in every god except their own,' said Birbal, 'and so it is they who, between them, give me all the reasons for believing in none.
1234 A poet's work . . . to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep.
3008 If I were asked for a one-sentence sound
bite on religion, I would say I was against it.
2767 Mahound comes to me for revelation, asking me to choose between monotheist and henotheist alternatives, and I'm just some idiot actor having a bhaenchud nightmare, what the fuck do I know, yaar, what to tell you, help. Help.
2742 Akhir yang bahagia harus terjadi pada akhir sesuatu, jika terjadi di pertengahann cerita atau sebuah petualangan, atau yang semacamnya, yang terjadi hanyalah hiburan sejenak. (Anjing Laut pada Harun, hal. 207)
1962 When a reader falls in love with a book, it leaves its essence inside him, like radioactive fallout in an arable field, and after that there are certain crops that will no longer grow in him, while other, stranger, more fantastic growths may occasionally be produced."
[Books vs. Goons, L.A. Times, April 24, 2005]
2263 A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return.
1743 You can get anywhere in Pakistan if you know people, even into jail.
3414 The great are eternally at the mercy of tiny men. And also, tiny madwomen.
1809 A book is not completed till it's read.
4844 Among the great struggles of man-good/evil, reason/unreason, etc.-there is also this mighty conflict between the fantasy of Home and the fantasy of Away, the dream of roots and the mirage of the journey.
4798 Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination, and of the heart.
3655 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.
3590 A man who catches History's eye is thereafter bound to a mistress from whom he will never escape.
1858 Non mi piacciono i matrimoni combinati. Ci sono sbagli dei quali non bisognerebbe mai poter incolpare i propri poveri genitori.
1250 ...because it is the privilige and the curse of midnight's children to be both masters and victims of their times, to forsake privacy and be sucked into the annihilating whirlpool of the multitudes, and to be unable to live or die in peace.
4146 A race that rejected the idea of personal sacrifice would surely be erased from time's records before long.
3706 Free societies...are societies in motion, and with motion comes tension, dissent, friction. Free people strike sparks, and those sparks are the best evidence of freedom's existence.
3223 How do you defeat terrorism? Don’t be terrorized.
3983 Masks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull.
1288 Things, even people have a way of leaking into each other like flavours when you cook.
4072 If power was a a cry, then human lives were lived in the echo of the cries of others.
2509 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.
1667 As though she had entered a fable, as though she were no more than words crawling along a dry page, or as though she were becoming that page itself, that surface on which her story would be written and across which there blew a hot and merciless wind, turning her body to papyrus, her skin to parchment, her soul to paper.
3439 Women have always moaned about men...but it turns out that their deepest complaints are reserved for one another, because while they expect men to be fickle, treacherous, and weak, they judge their own sex by higher standards, they expect more from their own sex-loyalty, understanding, trustworthiness, love....
3500 Do not start me on The Da Vinci Code ... a novel so bad that it gives bad novels a bad name."
(Discussion at Woodruff Auditorium in Lawrence, KS; October 7, 2005.)
1736 