Quotes from Salman Rushdie

unkept secrets always manage to escape, under a door, through a keyhole or an open window, until everyon knows everything and nobody knows how ... (...)

A race that rejected the idea of personal sacrifice would surely be erased from time's records before long.

And because the stories were held here in fluid form, they retained the ability to change, to become new versions of themselves, to join up with other stories and so become yet other stories; so that unlike a library of books, the Ocean of the Streams of Story was much more than a storeroom of yarns. It was not dead but alive.

Esta noite, ao rolhar energicamente um frasco com a etiqueta Fórmula Especial n.º 30, cheguei ao fim da minha longa autobiografia: em palavras e em conserva, imortalizei as minhas recordações, ainda que, num como noutro método, seja inevitável a distorção. Temos de viver, receio bem, com as sombras da imperfeição.

a person must sometimes choose what he will see and what he will not; look away, look away from there now.

In his thirteenth year he was old enough to play on the rocks at Scandal Point without having to be watched over by his ayah, Kasturba.

Her parents were killed in their private helicopter. An elite death but at the moment of dying we are all penniless. She never spoke of it. It would be generous to understand her behavior, willful, remote, abstract, as her way of expressing grief.

What's real and what's true aren't necessarily the same

It isn't right for the artist to become the servant of the state.

The city is where you go to hide, she said. In the country, in small towns or in the fields or forests, everybody sees you and everyone knows your business. In the city you are invisible because nobody cares.

REALITY IS A QUESTION of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems—but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible.

He was her warrior to be loved and waited for and she would take what little of him she could get and wait for the rest.

America's secret identity wasn't a superhero. Turns out it was a supervillain.

He knew himself to be a man with a true capacity for adoration, an area in which most of his fellow men, being uncivilised ignorant brutes, were sorely deficient. It had therefore been painful to him that almost all the women he pursued had, quite quickly after his pursuit began, done their best to run away.

She discussed her unhappiness with Mary Pereira, but the ayah only told her that there was no happiness to be gained from "the mens"; they made pickles together as they talked, and Amina stirred her disappointments into a hot lime chutney which never failed to bring tears to the eyes.

Metamorphosis, this is what I need to explain to her, is what supplants our need for the divine. This is what we can perform, our human magic

and she went on loving him, even though he had so casually abandoned her. You were my everything, she wanted to say to him, you were my sun and moon, and who will hold my head now, who will kiss my lips, who will be a father to our children, but he was a great man destined for the halls of the immortals, and these squalling brats were no more than the jetsam he let in his wake.

She let herself go physically: That has to be said. She became--there is not a polite way of putting this--blowsy. She sagged; for all her good works, her body became the emblem and manifestation of her grief.

Nobody has the right to not be offended.

it is the privilege and the curse of midnight's children to be both masters and victims of their times

truth is what it is instructed to be, reality quite literally ceases to exist, so that everything becomes possible except what we are told is the case;

la memoria es verdad, porque la memoria tiene su forma de ser especial. Selecciona, elimina, altera, exagera, minimiza, glorifica, y difama también; pero, en definitiva, crea su propia realidad, su versión heterogénea pero normalmente coherente de los acontecimientos; y ningún hombre en su sano juicio confía más

Will you love me when I get sick and start to fail, to descend, as is inevitable, toward death?" he said. "Do you really want to nurse a dying man and have to grieve for all the love you wasted on him?" "Love is never a waste," she said.

Yet I myself am a discontinuous being, not what I was meant to be, no longer what I was.