Quotes from Salman Rushdie

Shakespeare is both my door knocker and the owner of the domains to which the knock admits me, at once my Virgil opening the gates of hell and heaven, and the devil, and God, and I say this as a person who believes in neither God nor the devil, I believe only in Virgil…

Mostly, I heard about it from the Estate servants, who found it quite natural to speak openly of a death, but rarely said much about life, because in life everything was obvious.

Most of what matters in your life takes place in your absence.

My mother's pregnancy, it seems, was fated; my birth, however, owed a good deal to accident.

Snakes can lead to triumph, just as ladders can be descended: my grandfather, knowing I would die anyway, administered the cobra poison. The family stood and watched while poison spread through the child's body … and six hours later, my temperature had returned to normal.

in the midst of too much incident, Baby Saleem fell ill. As if incapable of assimilating so many goings-on, he closed his eyes and became red and flushed.

The leisure class, a.k.a. the landed gentry, on whom my business depends," he told Geronimo Manezes, "are the hunters, not the gatherers; they make their way by the immoral road of exploitation, not the virtuous path of industry. But I, to make my way, have to treat the rich as the good guys, the lions, the creators of wealth and guardians of freedom, which naturally I don't mind doing because I'm an exploiter too and I also want to think of myself as virtuous.

It was a rare thing to be granted one's heart's desire.

Unashamed, accustomed to solitude, he began to enjoy his near-invisibility. From his position at the edge of the school around him, he took vicarious pleasure in the activities of those around him, silently celebrating the rise or fall of this or that playground emperor, or the examination failures of particularly unappetizing class-fellows: the delights of the spectator.

one man long as a life and thin as a lie

Life is fury, he'd thought. Fury—sexual, Oedipal, political, magical, brutal—drives us to our finest heights and coarsest depths. Out of furia comes creation, inspiration, originality, passion, but also violence, pain, pure unafraid destruction, the giving and receiving of blows from which we never recover. The Furies pursue us; Shiva dances his furious dance to create and also to destroy.

She liked red wine but had no head for it and after two glasses became a different person, giggling, gesticulating, talking without stopping, interrupting others, and, always, wanting to dance.

Civilsation is the sleight of hand that conceals our natures from ourselves.

What is heroism in our time? What is villainy? How much we have forgotten, if we don't know the answer to such questions anymore.

When Don Anastasio Somoza fled the country, he took with him everything he could carry, including all the cash in the national treasury. He even had the bodies of Tacho I and Luis Somoza dug up and they, too, went into exile. No doubt he would have taken the land as well, if he'd known how.

the desperation of a mind unable to discipline itself and descending, therefore, into the carnivalesque. A mind imprisoned by itself, serving a life sentence.

his curse. "To be thin-skinned, far-sighted, and loose-tongued," he said, "is to feel too sharply, see too clearly, speak too freely. It is to be vulnerable to the world when the world believes itself invulnerable, to understand its mutability when it thinks itself immutable, to sense what's coming before others sense it, to know that the barbarian future is tearing down the gates of the present while others cling to the decadent, hollow past.

For the rest of his life that was what he said to anyone who asked—and there were people who asked, because the world is a cynical and suspicious place and, being full of liars, thinks of everything as a lie. Which is what Vidyasagar's story was.

As we will see, it did not succeed. In this way Pampa learned the lesson every creator must learn, even God himself. Once you had created your characters, you had to be bound by their choices. You were no longer free to remake them according to your own desires

In my family we've always found the world's air hard to breathe; we arrive hoping for somewhere better.

Across the Atlantic, in another theatre of the identity wars, the British prime minister was narrowing the definition of Britishness to exclude multiplicity, internationalism, the world as the location of the self. Only little England would do to define the English.

He was flying over India now, still making notes. He remembered hearing an Indian politician on TV talking about the British prime minister and being unable to pronounce her name properly. "Mrs. Torture," he kept saying. "Mrs. Margaret Torture." This was unaccountably funny.

Among geniuses intelligence loses its currency; they vie with each other at cooking or sex. So with immortals. When age becomes a constant, it becomes irrelevant.

And so, out of bloody-mindedness, I had said the word, and we went for the first time, into those Bombay Central alleys that have no name. Lamba introduced me simply as 'The Moor', and because I came with him there was less contempt than I had expected.