Quotes from Salman Rushdie

Such were the factors that detached Ormus Cama from the ordinary ties of family life. The ties that strangle us, which we call love. Because of the loosening of these ties he became, with all the attendant pain of such becoming, free. But love is what we want, not freedom. Who then is the unluckier man? The beloved, who is given his heart's desire and must forever after fear its loss, or the free man, with his unlooked-for liberty, naked and alone between the captive armies of the earth?

All names mean something.

We are the only animals that tell stories to understand the world we live in.

Can one drown in one's element... If fish can drown in water, can human beings suffocate in air?

The world is full of love stories, and all lovers are in a sense the avatars of their predecessors.

But shame is like everything else; live with it for long enough and it becomes part of the furniture.

In the end, you write the book that grabs you by the throat and demands to be written.

Straight answers were beyond the powers of Rashid Khalifa, who would never take a short cut if there was a longer, twistier road available.

I always thought storytelling was like juggling [...] You keep a lot of different tales in the air, and juggle them up and down, and if you're good you don't drop any.

Language upon a silvered tongue affords enchantment enough.

Peace broke out.

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.)

Captain Ahab drowned, he reminded himself; it was the trimmer, Ishmael, who survived.

If a birth is the fall-out from the explosion caused by the union of two unstable elements, then perhaps a half-life is all we can expect.

Abraham Zogoiby covered his face that night in August 1939 because he had been assailed by fear, [...] a sudden apprehension that the ugliness of life might defeat its beauty; that love did not make lovers invulnerable. Nevertheless, he thought, even if the world's beauty and love were on the edge of destruction, theirs would still be the only side to be on; defeated love would still be love, hate's victory would not make it other than it was.

All liberty required was that the space for discourse itself be protected. Liberty lay in the argument itself, not the resolution of that argument, in the ability to quarrel, even with the most cherished beliefs of others; a free society was not placid but turbulent. The bazaar of conflicting was the place where freedom rang.

Until you know who you are you can't write.

People think they are all sort of things they aren't' he had sad. 'They think they are talented when they're not; they think they're powerful when they're actually just bullies; they think they're good when they're bad. People fools themselves all the time, and they don't know that they're fools

She saw him fracture into rainbow colors through the prism of her love.

A book is a product of a pact with the Devil that inverts the Faustian contract, he'd told Allie. Dr Faustus sacrificed eternity in return for two dozen years of power; the writer agrees to the ruination of his life, and gains (but only if he's lucky) maybe not eternity, but posterity, at least. Either way (this was Jumpy's point) it's the Devil who wins.

He remembered the old Chinese proverb, sometimes ascribed to Confucius: If you sit by the river for long enough, the body of your enemy will float by.

You never know the answers to the questions of life until you are asked.

Do not contemplate what lies beyond failure while you are still trying to succeed.

O the shame of it, the humiliating shame of being condescended to by dolts