Quotes from Salman Rushdie

So the film was a kind of lie, because by existing it said: 'Observe the lengths we'll go to for your security. We'll even make you a movie about it.' Style instead of substance, the image instead of the reality

In the home of this music, alas, religious fanatics have lately started killing the musicians. They think the music is an insult to god, who gave us voices but does not wish us to sing, who gave us free will, rai, but prefers us not to be free.

OK, publishing a book and releasing a movie is all very well, but Tottenham beating Man. U. 3-2... priceless.

Human sanity was a poor, fragile thing at best

It did not occur to any of them that their decision was born of a colossal sense of entitlement, this notion that they could just step away from yesterday and start tomorrow as if it wasn't a part of the same week, to move beyond memory and roots and language and race into the land of the self-made self, which is another way of saying, America.

The old man has always believed in the mutability of things; has known that no matter how solid the ground beneath your feet may seem, it can, at any moment, turn into quicksand and suck you down. Always be prepared.

Beware the man (or jinni) of action when he finally seeks to better himself with thought. A little thinking is a dangerous thing.

If a hungry dog looks for food, he does not look in the doghouse.

What Rushdie took away from reading Gunter Grass's The Tin Drum]: Go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets. Take a deep breath before you begin talking. Aim for the stars. Keep grinning. Be ruthless. Argue with the world. And never forget that writing is as close as we get to keeping a hold on the thousand and one things--childhood, certainties, cities, doubts, dreams, instants, phrases, parents, loves--that go on slipping like sand, through our fingers.

?ôi khi núi non ph?i ??i d?i ?? c? nhân ???c tái ngá»™.

They are the Eggheads. He is the Walrus.

These stories become what we know, what we understand, and what we are, or, perhaps we should say, what we have become, or can perhaps be.

Bir yere ait olmayan insanlar ne olacak? Nereye? Nereye ait olmayan? Herhangi bir yere. Herhangi bir ÅŸeye, herhangi bir kimseye. Fiziksel olarak bir ba?? olmayanlar. Uzay boÅŸluÄŸundaki kuyrukluy?ld?zlar gibi hiçbir çekim gücüne tabi olmayanlar.

Who what am I? My answer: 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

In my stolen photographs -- for the photographer must be a thief, he must steal instants of other people's time to make his own tiny eternities -- it was this intimacy I sought, hte closeness of the living and the dead.

I sigh therefore I am . . . In the beginning and unto the end was and is the lung: divine afflatus, baby's first yowl, shaped air of speech, staccato gusts of laughter, exalted airs of song, happy lover's groan, unhappy lover's lament, miser's whine, crone's croak, illness's stench, dying whisper, and beyond and beyond the airless, silent void. A sigh isn't just a sigh. We inhale the world and breathe out meaning. While we can. While we can.

H]as it really been so long since religions persecuted people, burning them as heretics, drowning them as witches, that you can't recognize religious persecution when you see it? [ 1,000 Days 'Trapped Inside a Metaphor' (Columbia University / The New York Times , December 12, 1991)]

And my grandfather... was forever knocked into that middle place, unable to worship a God in whose existence he could not wholly disbelieve. Permanent alteration: a hole.

And blessed be the first sweet suffering that I felt in being conjoined with love and the bow and the shafts with which I was pierced, and the wounds that run to the depths of my heart…" any man who loves this poem as I do, must be my master... And any man who feels as I do about these words must be my drinking companion.

But but but what is the point of giving persons Freedom of Speech,' declaimed Butt the Hoopoe, 'if you then say they must not utilize same? And is not the Power of Speech the greatest Power of all? Then surely it must be exercised to the full?

the old are destroying the young by them to die in distant fields, and in response the young are destroying themselves.

En el exilio todo intento de arraigo se considera traición: es el reconocimiento de la derrota.

Perhaps we, who are language animals, possess a song and story instinct; we need and move toward stories and songs not because we are taught to do so but because it is in our nature to need them.

This is known, and what is not known does not undermine it. This is the scientific way. To be open about the limits of one's knowledge increases public confidence in what one says is known.