Quotes from Salman Rushdie

Impossible stories, stories with No Entry signs on them, change our lives, and our minds, as often as the authorized versions, the stories we are expected to trust, upon which we are asked, or told, to build our judgements, and our lives.

had sought, and with that comprehension came a new clarity, a return to sanity, and even a kind of wisdom.

which she had spent long and happy hours releasing from their shells, with crazy dedication, because the shelling of pine-kernels is a form of lunacy, you spend more energy getting the damn things out than they give you when you eat.

people understood for the first time [...] that in the end the salvation of human beings came from other human beings and not from things, no matter how large and imposing – and even magical – those things might be

And my grandfather, lurching upright, made a resolve. Stood. Rolled cheroot. Stared across the lake. And was knocked forever into that middle place, unable to worship a God in whose existence he could not wholly disbelieve. Permanent alteration: a hole.

His beard was thick and red—and annoyed his mother, who said only Hajis, men who had made the pilgrimage to Mecca, should grow red beards. His hair, however, was rather darker. His sky-eyes you know about. Ingrid had said, "They went mad with the colors when they made your face.

How young he was when he made the surprisingly adult resolution to escape from the unpalatable reality of dreams into the slightly more acceptable illusions of his everyday, walking life!

How to dispense with Padma? How give up her ignorance and superstition, necessary counterweights to my miracle-laden omniscience? How to do without her paradoxical earthiness of spirit, which keeps—kept!—my feet on the ground? I have become, it seems to me, the apex of an isosceles triangle, supported equally by twin deities, the wild god of memory and the lotus-goddess of the present … but must I now become reconciled to the narrow one-dimensionality of a straight line?

In ancient times,' Quichotte said, in a last appeal to reason, 'when a woman was accused of witchcraft, the proofs were that she has a familiar, usually a cat, plus a broomstick and a third nipple for the Devil to suck on. But almost all homes had cats and brooms and in those days many people's bodies had warts. Thus the mere accusation, witch!, was all that was required. The proof was in every home and on every woman's body and therefore all women so accused were automatically guilty.

All over the world great writers were dying young: Italo Calvino, Raymond Carver, and now here was Angela wrestling with the Reaper. A fatwa was not the only way to die. There were older types of death sentence that still worked very well.

We, for our own part, simply call ourselves we. We are the creature that tells itself stories to understand what sort of creature it is.

Kaderini kucakla dedi, Sana üzüntü verenden keyif al. Kaçmak istediÄŸin ÅŸeye doÄŸru dön ve bütün kalbinle ona koÅŸ. TalihsizliÄŸini yaln?z ona dönüÅŸerek aÅŸabilirsin.

Oysa onu ac? ac? seviyorlard?, asla kar??l?k veremeyecek kadar tutkulu bir sevgi duyuyorlard? ona; kar??l?k vermeyen sevgisinin izin verdiÄŸi ölçüde seviyorlard? onu.

A poet's work,' he answers. 'To name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep.

Vow," he cried, reeling. "It isn't bad enough being a brown dude in America, you're telling me I'm half fucking goblin as well.

He was already beginning to understand that what was wrong with his writing was that there was something wrong, something misconceived, about him. If he hadn't become the writer he thought he had it in him to be, it was because he didn't know who he was. And slowly, from his ignominious place at the bottom of the literary barrel, he began to understand who that person might be. He was a migrant. He was one of those who had ended up in a place that was not the place where he began.

Women have always moaned about men...but it turns out that their deepest complaints are reserved for one another, because while they expect men to be fickle, treacherous, and weak, they judge their own sex by higher standards, they expect more from their own sex--loyalty, understanding, trustworthiness, love....

The problem is not technological," he said. "And there is no technological solution to it. The problem is human, human nature in general, male human nature in particular

The thief's widow had turned him, before she married him, into a thief of a stupid and terrible kind, because she had made him rob himself.

He stared into the fast-flowing waters and contemplated the tragedy of desire.

The only people who see the whole picture are the ones who step out of the frame.

Bir toplumun kilidini açmak istiyorsan?z, tercüme edilemeyen kelimelerine bak?n.

His mother had survived decades of marriage to his angry, disappointed, alcoholic father by developing what she called a "forgettery" instead of a memory. She woke up every day and forgot the day before. He, too, seemed to lack a memory for trouble, and woke up remembering only what he yearned for. But he did not act upon his yearning. She had left for America and that was for the best.

Akhir yang bahagia harus terjadi pada akhir sesuatu, jika terjadi di pertengahann cerita atau sebuah petualangan, atau yang semacamnya, yang terjadi hanyalah hiburan sejenak. (Anjing Laut pada Harun, hal. 207)