Quotes from Salman Rushdie

In this century history stopped paying attention to the old psychological orientation of reality. I mean, these days, character isn't destiny any more. Economy is destiny. Ideology is destiny. Bombs are destiny. What does a famine, a gas chamber, a grenade care how you lived your life? Crisis comes, death comes, and your pathetic individual self doesn't have a thing to do with it, only to suffer the effects.

From 'The Suicide', a play by the Russian writer Nikolai Erdman: 'Only the dead can say what the living are thinking.

We walk unknowing amid the shadows of our past and, forgetting our history, are ignorant of ourselves.

When ninety-nine percent of people thought the world was flat," Evel said, "it didn't make the world flat. The world didn't need people to believe it was round to be round. Right now, ninety-nine percent of people are happily having a picnic on a railway track. Which doesn't mean there isn't a train coming down the line, traveling pretty fast. The railway train doesn't need people to believe it's coming, because it's coming.

I don't want to admit that the savages are winning, that the jungle is creeping in and recapturing the civilized world--the jungle where the only law is the law of the jungle--but on many days every week that's how it feels.

Burn the books and trust the Book; shred the papers and hear the Word.

It was always women who did the choosing, and men's place was to be grateful if they were lucky enough to be the chosen ones. Joseph Anton

what a leveller this remote-control gizmo was...it chopped down the heavyweight and stretched out the slight until all the set's emissions, commercials, murders, game-shows, the thousand and one varying joys and terrors of the real and the imagined, acquired an equal weight...

He would dream of discovering a magic optometrist from whom he would purchase a pair of green-tinged spectacles which would correct his regrettable myopia, and after that he would be able to see through the dense, blinding air to the fabulous world beneath.

Names, once they are in common use, quickly become mere sounds, their etymology being buried, like so many of the earth's marvels, beneath the dust of habit.

When thought becomes excessively painful, action is the finest remedy.

Sometimes it's just over and you can't make it all right. Justification by works: an overrated idea.

Between the self and the other, between the visionary and the psychopath, between the lover and his love, between the overworld and the underworld, falls the Shadow.

Why demons, when man himself is a demon?' the Nobel Laureate Singer's 'last demon' asked from his attic in Tishevitz. To which Chamcha's sense of balance, his much-to-be-said-for-and-against reflex, wished to add: 'And why angels, when man is angelic too?

But it's not as simple as that, he told himself, because the dance of the Shadow Warrior showed him that silence had its own grace and beauty (just as speech could be graceless and ugly); and that Action could be as noble as Words; and that creatures of darkness could be as lovely as the children of the light. If Guppees and Chupwalas didn't hate each other so, he thought, they might actually find each other pretty interesting. Opposites attract, as they say.

La misión del poeta es nombrar lo innombrable, denunciar el engaño, tomar partido, iniciar discusiones, dar forma al mundo e impedir que se duerma.»

In spite of all my efforts to create a neat, tidy, obedient, moderate, unexceptional persona, I was simply too weird for them; until that is, my first female tutor was hired.

All of us are in two stories at the same time, said the sandwich lady. Life and Times. There is our own personal story, and the bigger story of what's happening around us. When both are in trouble simultaneously, when the crisis inside you intersects with the crisis outside you, things get a little crazy.

Después de exigir mi marcha, ya no posees jurisdicción en lo concerniente a mi salud.

If we can cease envisaging ourselves as metaphorical foetuses, and substitute the image of a newborn child, then that will be at least a small intellectual advance. In time, perhaps, we may even learn to toddle.

Most of the oppression of Muslims in the world right now is carried out by other Muslims.

we often imagined, as we drove, a fictional universe in which Fitzgerald's and Wodehouse's creations might visit one another. Bertie Wooster and Jeeves might have intruded on the rarefied world of the Eggs, silly-ass Bertie stepping into sensible Nick Carraway's shoes, and Reginald Jeeves the fish-eating Spinoza-loving gentleman's gentleman and genius finding a way to give Jay Gatsby the happy-ever-after ending with Daisy Buchanan for which he so profoundly longed.

Say we are from nowhere or anywhere or somewhere, we are make-believe people, frauds, reinventions, shapeshifters, which is to say, Americans.

Enough of invisibility, silence, timidity, defensiveness, guilt! An invisible, silenced man was an empty space into which others could pour their prejudices, their agendas, their wrath. The fight against fanaticism needed visible faces, audible voices. He would be quiet no longer. He would try to become a loud and visible man.