Quotes from Salman Rushdie

Normal doesn't feel so normal to me, I tell him. It's normal to feel that way, he replies.

As a people, we are obsessed with correspondences. Similarities between this and that, between apparently unconnected things, make us clap our hands delightedly when we find them out. It is a sort of national longing for form—or perhaps simply an expression of our deep belief that forms lie hidden within reality; that meaning reveals itself only in flashes.

A few seconds later, my father broke his big toe; but his accident was a mere trifle when set beside what had befallen me in that benighted moment, because thanks to the occult tyrannies of those blandly saluting clocks I had been mysteriously handcuffed to history, my destinies indissolubly chained to those of my country.

What is the use of stories that arent even true?

the real world was full of magic, so magical worlds could easily be real.

Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, power to retell it, power to rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change, are truly powerless, because they cannot think new thoughts.

He talked about wanting to take on the destructive, mind-numbing junk culture of his time just as Cervantes had gone to war with the junk culture of his own age.

Neela had dressed for beauty, not for warmth, and the afternoon had lost its glow. Solanka took off his coat and put it over her trembling shoulders. All around them in the park the colours were fading. The world became a place of blacks and greys. Women's clothes – unusually for New York, it had been a season of bright colours – faded to monochrome. Under a gunmetal sky, the green leached out of the spreading trees.

I learned that love is for the most part absent and, when it appears, is usually fitful, fleeting, and finally unsatisfactory. I learned that the communities men build are based on the oppression of the many by the few, and I did not understand

The people with whom you share a history: these are the people who can leave you shipwrecked and drowning.

But great tragedy is universal

When he was young, he told her, each phase of his life, each self he tried on, had seemed reassuringly temporary. Its imperfections didn't matter, because he could easily replace one moment by the next, one Saladin by another.

The Hindustani storyteller always knows when he loses his audience, he said. Because the audience simply gets up and leave, or else it throws vegetables, or, if the audience is the king, it occasionally throws the storyteller headfirst off the city ramparts. And in this case, my dear Mogor-Uncle, the audience is indeed the king.

History is the consequence not only of people's actions, but also of their forgetfulness.

Kaçarken bir yandan ipuçlar?yla dolu bir korsan haritas?na, üzerindeki X iÅŸaretlerinin ÅŸahs?mdan mürekkep bir hazineyi iÅŸaret ettiÄŸi korsan haritama çevirdim dünyay?. PeÅŸimdekiler b?rakt???m izleri sürüp geldikleri zaman beni ÅŸikâyetsiz, soluksuz, haz?r bekler bulacaklar. Ä°ÅŸte burada duruyorum. Olaca?? buydu.

Then she found him. - And maybe he'd invented her, too, a little bit, invented someone worth rushing out of one's old life to love. - Nothing so remarkable in that. Happens often enough; and the two inventors go on, rubbing the rough edges off one another, adjusting their inventions, moulding imagination to actuality, learning how to be together; or not. It works out or it doesn't.

They came into being simultaneously in a garden, Eve and Adam, fully grown and naked and enjoying you could say the first Big Bang, and they had no idea how they got there until a snake led them to the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and when they ate its fruit they both simultaneously came up with the idea of a creator-god, a good- and-evil decider, a gardener-god who made the garden, otherwise where did the garden come from, and then planted them in it like rootless plants. And

Are you alcoholic? it read. We can help. Call this number for liquor home delivery.

Siz olsan?z, s?n?rlar?n karanl?k taraf?na sürgün edildiÄŸinizde karanl??? ayd?nl??a çevirmeye çal??maz m?yd?n?z?

It's as if we're standing still and the world is traveling past us. Or maybe the world is TV and I don't know who's in charge of the zapper.

the new Filipino President's name had become a saucy joke: 'Corazon, aqui, no?' That is: 'Darling, let's do it here, eh?' Or, if the words were stressed differently: 'Corazon, aqui? — No!'

Gerçek hemen her zaman istisnai, acayip, beklenmediktir ve neredeyse her zaman kurals?zd?r, soÄŸukkanl? hesaplarla önceden tahmin edilemez.

Crisis shines a very bright light on human behavior, leaves no shadows in which we can hide, and reveals, simultaneously, the worst of which we are capable and our better natures

On this day Bisnaga moves out of the realm of the fantastic into that of the historical, and the great river of its story flows into the ocean of stories which is the history of the world.