Quotes from Salman Rushdie

Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination, and of the heart.

Nobody ever wanted to go to war, but if a war came your way, it might as well be the right war, about the most important things in the world, and you might as well, if you were going to fight it, be called Rushdie, and stand where your father had placed you, in the tradition of the grand Aristotelian, Averroës, Abul Walid Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Rushd.

the children of the hour of darkness were born, I'm afraid, in the midst of the age of darkness; so that although we found it easy to be brilliant, we were always confused about being good.

and I began to wonder if we were moral beings at all or simply savages who defined their private bigotries as necessary ethics, as the only ways to be.

Violent action is unclear to most of those who get caught up in it. Experience is fragmentary; cause and effect,why and how, are torn apart. Only sequence exists. First this then that. And afterward, for those who survived, a lifetime of trying to understand

he wished he could have roots spreading under every inch of his lost soil, his beloved lost home, that he could have been part of something, that he could have been himself, walking down the road not taken, living a life in context and not the migrant's hollow journey that had been his fate

Tüm resmi görebilenler, çerçevenin d???na ad?m atanlard?r.

One foreign correspondent came up to be friendly. He asked this man what he should think about what Khomeini had said. How seriously should he take it? Was it just a rhetorical flourish or something genuinely dangerous? "Oh, don't worry too much," the journalist said. "Khomeini sentences the president of the United States to death every Friday afternoon.

If you take a look at history, you will find that the understanding of what is good and evil has always existed before the individual religions. The religions were only invented by people afterwards, in order to express this idea.

Happy endings must come at the end of something,' the Walrus pointed out. 'If they happen in the middle of a story, or an adventure, or the like, all they do is cheer things up for a while. 'That'll do,' said Haroun.

Who hopes for an hour hopes for eternity. The world in an hour. What follows is unseen.

one could accept Muhammad as a genuine mystic—just as one could accept Joan of Arc's voices as having genuinely been heard by her, or the revelations of Saint John the Divine as being that troubled soul's 'real' experiences—without needing also to accept that, had one been standing next to the Prophet of Islam on Mount Hira that day, one would also have seen the Archangel.

children are the vessels into which adults pour their poison, and it was the poison of grown-ups which did for us.

But if a peacock dances in the jungle, there is nobody to see its tail.

Már régen tökélyre vitte azt a képességet, hogy csak azt lássa, akit látni akar, ami létfontosságú készség, ha az ember a világnak nem áldozata, hanem ura akar lenni.

The great are eternally at the mercy of tiny men. And also, tiny madwomen.

I am your handiwork made flesh. You took beauty and created hideousness, and out of this monstrosity your child will be born …. I am the meaning of your deeds. I am the meaning of your so-called love; your destructive, selfish, wanton love … your love looks just like hatred.

for to the arguments of great thinkers there is no end, the idea of argument itself being a tool to improve the mind, the sharpest of all tools, born of the love of knowledge, which is to say, philosophy.

Things—even people—have a way of leaking into each other," I explain, "like flavors when you cook.

When you have things, then there is time to dream; when you don't, you fight.

The future, even when it was only a question-shrouded glimmer, would not be eclipsed by the past; even when death moved towards the centre of the stage, life went on fighting for equal rights.

And lo, there, immediately, was god, and he was furious. 'How did you come up with the idea of me,' he demanded, 'who asked you to do that?' and he threw them out of the garden, into, of all places, Iraq. 'No good deed goes unpunished,' said Eve to Adam, and that ought to be the motto of the entire human race. The

We, the living, must find what space we can alongside them; the giant dead whom we cannot tie down, though we grasp at their hair, though we rope them while they sleep

Ravings, in short, jealousy of the past, the worst kind of all.