Quotes from Salman Rushdie

If Woody Allen were a Muslim, he'd be dead by now.

to admit we do not understand a phenomenon is not to admit the presence of the miraculous but merely, reasonably, to accept the limitations of human knowledge. God was invented to explain what our ancestors couldn't comprehend: the radiant mystery of being. The existence of the incomprehensible, however, is not a proof of god.

Rich kid, Shiva yelled, you don't know one damn thing! What purpose , man? What thing in the whole sister-sleeping world got reason , yara? For what reason you're rich and I'm poor? Where's the reason in starving, man? God knows how many millions of damn fools living in this country, man, and you think there's a purpose! Man, I'll tell you -- you got to get what you can, do what you can with it, and then you got to die. That's reason, rich boy. Everything else is only mother-sleeping wind !

Keep away from her, said Ameer Merchant, but once the inexorable dynamic of the mythic has been set in motion, you might as well try and keep bees from honey, crooks from money, politicians from babies, philosophers from maybes. Vina had her hooks in me, and the consequence was the story of my life.

they came in search of the hot stuff, just like any man calling on a tart.

time, in my experience, has been as variable and inconstant as Bombay's electric power supply. Just telephone the speaking clock if you don't believe me – tied to electricity, it's usually a few hours wrong. Unless we're the ones who are wrong . . . 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.)

every story one chooses to tell is a kind of censorship, it prevents the telling of other tales (...)

Honesty is not the best policy in life. Only, perhaps, in art.

Life again refused to remain lifesized

This is how people behave when their dailiness is destroyed, when for a few moments they see, plain and unadorned, one of the great shaping forces of life. Calamity fixes them with her mesmeric eye, and they begin to scoop and paw at the rubble of their days, trying to pluck the memory of the quotidian - a toy, a book, a garment, even a photograph - from the garbage heaps of the irretrievable, of their overwhelming loss.

The enemy is stupid, he replied. That is ground for hope. There is no originality in tyrants, and they learn nothing from the demise of their precursors. They will be brutal and stifling and engender hatred and destroy what men love and that will defeat them. All important battles are, in the end, conflicts between hatred and love, and we must hold to the idea that love is stronger than hate.

I grew up kissing books and bread

Did you know, ji,' Zulu offered, 'that the map of Tolkien's Middle earth fits quite well over central England and Wales? Maybe all fairylands are right here, in our midst.

One of the things a writer is for is to say the unsayable, speak the unspeakable and ask difficult questions.

The black ice of that dark fortress received the sunlight like a mortal wound.

When you've fallen from the sky, been abandoned by your friend, suffered police brutality, metamorphosed into a goat, lost your work as well as your wife, learned the power of hatred and regained human shape, what is there left to do but, as you would no doubt phrase it, demand your rights?

When he resigned his boss thought he was asking for more money. 'No,' he said. 'I'm just going to try to be a full-time writer.' Oh, his boss said, you want a lot more money. 'No, really,' he said. 'This isn't a negotiation. I'm just giving you my thirty days' notice. Thirty-one days from now, I won't be coming in.' Hmm, his boss replied. I don't think we can give you as much money as that .

But sixteen years without optimism had taken a heavy toll;

She says, trying uselessly to console me: 'What are you so long for in your face? Everybody forgets some small things, all the time!' But if small things go, will large things be close behind?

Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, power to retell it, to rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change, truly are powerless.

Genius was being born in her, filling the empty spaces in her bed, her heart, her womb. She needed no-one but herself.

Life has vanquished death and even the furniture celebrates.

I allowed myself the supernatural, the transcendent, because, I told myself, our love of metaphor is pre-religious, born of our need to express what is inexpressible, our dreams of otherness, of more.

Maybe I should go home. I miss Bombay. But the Bombay I miss isn't there to go home to anymore. This is who we are. We sail away from the place we love and then because we aren't there to love it people go with axes and burning torches and smash and burn and then we say, Oh, too sad. But we abandoned it, left it to our barbarian successors to destroy.