Quotes from Salman Rushdie

Als je in de twintigste eeuw leeft, valt het niet moeilijk in hen die wanhopiger zijn dan jijzelf en die proberen het leven naar hun wil te modelleren, jezelf te ontmoeten.

The crux of a great person's life is the choice between doing what is right and what he wants to do. Abraham Lincoln, who was a proficient wrestler and enjoyed a good bout, probably would have preferred spending his time on the mat to starting a war in which approximately two per cent of the population died

To be born again, sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, first you have to die.

Midnight has many children; the offspring of Independence were not all human. Violence, corruption, poverty, generals, chaos, greed and pepperpots … I had to go into exile to learn that the children of midnight were more varied than I—even I—had dreamed.

At an English boarding school in the early 1960s, he quickly discovered, there were three bad mistakes you could make, but if you made only two of the three you could be forgiven. The mistakes were: to be foreign; to be clever; and to be bad at games […]. He made all three mistakes. He was foreign, clever, non-sportif.

Mie ar trebui s? îmi fie ruÈ™ine, îl inform? el pe un porumbel cocoÈ›at pe marginea ferestrei. Stau aici, f?când ceea ce critic, cu gândurile Dumnezeu È™tie unde, tr?ind prea mult în imaginaÈ›ie.

A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it or offer your own version in return

but no, ends must not be permitted to precede beginnings and middles, even if recent scientific experiments have shown us that within certain types of closed systems, under intense pressure, time can be persuaded to run backwards, so that effects precede their causes.

Aš iš tav?s padariau žmog?. Bet kok? žmog?? To t?vai niekada nežino. Bent jau iš anksto; o kai sužino, b?na per v?lu.

The heathen grew up heathenish and, in Windsor Villa at least, that was just fine.

En esta ciudad, Mahound, el negociante-profeta, está fundando una de las grandes religiones del mundo;

As we grow, we lose our belief in our progenitors's superhuman nature. They shrivel into more or less unimpressive men and women. Apollo turns out to be Oeagrus, god and Joseph the carpenter end up being one and the same. The gods we worship, we discover, are not different from ourselves.

Once, I belonged to the future. The beloved future of my beloved mother, that was what counted; the present was a means, and the past no more than a dull shard of pottery, a bottle dug up by my father on the beach. Now, however, I belong to yesterday. Is that a line from a song? I forget. Is it?

And as for the city itself - it was to be the capital of Maharashtra; or of both Maharashtra and Gujarat; or an independent state of its own...while the government tried to work out what on earth to do, the city's inhabitants decided to encourage it to be quick. Riots proliferated..

Deprived of the income he had received from Homi Catrack, my uncle had taken his booming voice and his obsessions with hearts and reality up to the roof of his Marine Drive apartment block; he had stepped out into the evening sea-breeze, frightening the beggars so much (when he fell) that they gave up pretending to be blind and ran away yelling … in death as in life, Hanif Aziz espoused the cause of truth and put illusion to flight.

The landscape of his poetry was still the desert...

The curse of the human race is not that we are so different from one another, but that we are so alike.

No shortage of explanations for life's mysteries. Explanations are two a penny these days. The truth, however, is altogether harder to find

Even great Bellow, he saw in the Times, had been unclear on the question of the heart, and had asked on his deathbed: "Was I a man, or was I a jerk?

Prince Bolo, who didn't like his Pages to say, 'I told you so,' snapped back: 'What's this, Blabbermouth? Are you a girl?' You /noticed/, sire,' said Blabbermouth. 'No point /pretending/ any /more/.' 'You tricked us,' said Bolo, blushing. 'You tricked /me/.' Blabbermouth was outraged by Bolo's ingratitude. 'Tricking you isn't exactly /difficult/, excuse /me/,' she cried. '/Jugglers/ can do it, so why not /girls/?

Five mysteries hold the keys to the unseen: the act of love, and the birth of a baby, and the contemplation of great art, and being in the presence of death or disaster, and hearing the human voice lifted in song. These are the occasions when the bolts of the universe fly open and we are given a glimpse of what is hidden; an eff of the ineffable.

Her temperament, however, was Akbar's own creation. No real woman was ever like that, so perfectly attentive, so undemanding, so endlessly available. She was an impossibility, a fantasy of perfection. They feared her, knowing that, being impossible, she was irresistible, and that was why the king loved her best.

I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I've gone which would not have happened if I had not come. Nor am I particularly exceptional in this matter; each "I," every one of the now-six-hundred-million-plus of us, contains a similar multitude. I repeat for the last time: to understand me, you'll have to swallow a world.

But the past is not less valuable because it is no longer the present. In fact, it's more important, because forever unseen.