Quotes from Salmon Rushdie

The first lesson of my life: nobody can face the world with his eyes open all the time.

I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I've gone which would not have happened if I had not come. Nor am I particularly exceptional in this matter; each I,...contains a similar multitude. To understand me, you'll have to swallow a world.

Trapped inside a metaphor, I've often felt the need to re-describe it, to change the terms. This isn't so much a balloon, I've wanted to say, as a bubble within which I'm simultaneously exposed and sealed off.... depriving me of reality, reducing me to an abstraction.... [NY, Dec. 1991; Columbia Graduate School Of Journalism Speech]

All novelists know that crisis reveals character.

if human nature were not a mystery, we'd have no need of poets.

Once before, my daughter,' she said, ignoring Ahmed's continuing ravings, 'your father and I, whatsitsname, said there was no shame in leaving an inadequate husband. Now I say again: you have, whatsitsname, a man of unspeakable vileness. Go from him; go today, and take your children, whatsitsname, away from these oaths which he spews from his lips like an animal, whatsitsname, of the gutter. Take your children, I say, whatsitsname-both your children,' she said, clutching me to her bosom.

Unbendingness can also be monomania, it can ca be tyranny, and also it can be brittle, whereas what is flexible can also be humane, and strong enough to last.

This floor is a cold floor. I should get up off this floor. There's still a fat fellow over there, and he's pointing a pistol at my heart.

I told you so',was Abdullah Noman's favourite song,because he was cursed with the curse of knowing too much and the double curse of being unable to avoid pointing this out even though it made Firdus Begum threaten to hit him on the head with a stone.