Quotes from Salman Rushdie

He had picked up languages the way most sailors pick up diseases; languages were his gonorrhoea, his syphilis, his scurvy, his ague, his plague.

I, too, have ropes around my neck. I have them to this day, pulling me this way and that, East and West, the nooses tightening, commanding, choose, choose. I buck, I snort, I whinny, I rear, Ikick. Ropes, I do not choose between you. Lassoes, lariats, I choose neither of you, and both. Doyou hear? I refuse to choose.

Most people define themselves by their work, or where they come from, or suchlike; we had lived too far inside our heads. It makes actuality damn hard to handle.

If I seem a little bizarre, remember the wild profusion of my inheritance...perhaps, if one wishes to remain an individual in the midst of the teeming multitudes, one must make oneself grotesque.

this is our tragedy, she said in his words, our fictions are killing us, but if we didn't have those fictions, maybe that would kill us too.

let me belong again to that faraway place I left so long ago, from which I am alienated, and which has forgotten me, in which I am an alien now even though it was the place where I began, let me belong again, walk those streets knowing they are mine, knowing that my story is a part of those streets, even though it isn't, it hasn't been for most of a lifetime, let it be so, let it be so

Two things form the bedrock of any open society — freedom of expression and rule of law. If you don't have those things, you don't have a free country. [ Don't allow religious hooligans to dictate terms ( The Times of India , January 16, 2008)]

Our lives teach us who we are. I have learned the hard way that when you permit anyone else's description of reality to supplant your own ... then you might as well be dead.

One of the problems with defending free speech is you often have to defend people that you find to be outrageous and unpleasant and disgusting.

The point is always reached after which the gods no longer share their lives with mortal men and women, they die or wither away or retire... Now that they've gone, the high drama's over. What remains is ordinary human life.

If by some bizarre chance there turns out to be a god [...], I'm willing to bet he's an atheist too.

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.

Religion was the glue of Pakistan, holding the halves together; just as consciousness, the awareness of oneself as a homogenous entity in time, a blend of past and present, is the glue of personality, holding together our then and our now.

What happens when you win? When your enemies are at your mercy: how will you act then? Compromise is the temptation of the weak; this is the test for the strong.

Why obliterate the exceptional merely in order to make the outstanding look finer than it was?

William the Conqueror, it is said, began by eating a mouthful of English sand.

He did not wish to be divine. If there had never been a God, the emperor thought, it might have been easier to work out what goodness was. This business of worship, of the abnegation of self in the face of the Almighty, was a distraction, a false trail. Wherever goodness lay, it did not lie in ritual, unthinking obeisance before a deity but rather, perhaps, in the slow, clumsy, error-strewn working out of an individual or collective path.

They were deeply in love, which beats earplugs.

You'll say things all wrong but they'll at once become American ways of saying things. You won't know shit but it'll right away become an American type of ignorance. Not belonging, that's an old American tradition, see?, that's the American way.

How far did they fly? Five and a half thousand as the crow. Or: from Indianness to Englishness, an immeasurable distance. Or, not very far at all, because they rose from one great city, fell to another. The distance between cities is always small; a villager, travelling a hundred miles to town, traverses emptier, darker, more terrifying space.

Scraps of memory: this is not how a climax should be written. A climax should surge towards its Himalayan peak; but I am left with shreds, and must jerk towards my crisis like a puppet with broken strings. This is not what I had planned; but perhaps the story you finish is never the one you begin.

The actor's life offers, on a daily basis, the simulacrum of love; a mask can be satisfied, or at least consoled, by the echo of what it seeks.

We strive for heights bit our natures betray us, Chamcha thought; clowns in search of crowns. The bitterness overcame him

A comfortable prison was still a prison.