Quotes from Salman Rushdie

What is her name? I don't know. I know her eyebrows.

How do you behave when you win? When your enemies are at your mercy and your power has become absolute: what then?

free speech isn't absolute. We have the freedoms we fight for and we lose those we don't defend.

The Pages of Gup, now that they had talked through everything so fully, fought hard, remained united, support each other when required to do so, and in general looked like a force with a common purpose. All those arguments and debates, all that openness, had created powerful bonds of friendship between them.

Who am I? Let's put it this way: who has the best tunes?

the act of falling in love with a book or story changes us in some way, and the beloved tale becomes a part of our picture of the world, a part of the way in which we understand things and make judgments and choices in our daily lives.

I'll drink some wine, and then, like a latter-day Van Winkle, I'll lay me down upon this graven stone, lay my head beneath these letters RIP, and close my eyes, according to our family's old practice of falling asleep in times of trouble, and hope to awaken, renewed and joyful, into a better time.

O, Need's a funny fish: it makes people untruthful. They all suffer from it, but they will not always admit.

PLEASE BELIEVE that I am falling apart.

From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable. He moves in mysterious ways: men say.

I don't want to be elite. Am I elite?" "You need to work on it. You need to become post-factual." "Is that the same as fictional?" "Fiction's elite. Nobody believes it. Post-factual is mass market, information-age, troll generated. It's what people want.

Man is the storytelling animal, the only creature on earth that told itself stories to understand what kind of creature it was. The story was his birthright, and nobody could take it away.

Maybe this is what human history was: the brief illusion of happy victories set in a long continuum of bitter, disillusioning defeats.

Little rich boy, that's all just wind. All that importance-of-the-individual. All that possibility-of-humanity. Today, what people are is just another kind of thing.

The art of the cinema,' Truffaut allegedly said, 'is to point the camera at a beautiful woman.

it feels as if half your life is a sort of struggle toward the sunlight. Then you get five minutes in the sun and after that you're dragged down into the darkness again

What can't be cured must be endured.

The universe was a place of wonders, and only habituation, the anaesthesia of the everyday, dulled our sight.

his way of walking toward closed doors without slowing down, knowing they would open for him;

The inconspicuous nine-vehicle motorcade rolled toward Manhattan with motorcycle sirens blaring and lights flashing, attracting no attention at all.

Death and life were just adjacent verandas.

We are in the process of instituting a reign of terror on earth, and there's only one word that justifies that as far as these savages are concerned: the word of this or that god. In name of a divine entity we can do whatever the hell we like and most of those fools down there will swallow it like a bitter pill.

If you live in the twentieth century you do not find it hard to see yourself in those, more desperate than yourself, who seek to shape it to their will.

los paraísos artificiales acaban en infiernos naturales...