Quotes from Salman Rushdie

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

While you were anesthetized to the tragedy of life you were able to survive. When clarity was returned to you, when it was painstakingly restored, it could drive you mad.

Call it Mooristan,' Aurora told me. 'This seaside, this hill, with the fort on top. Water-gardens and hanging gardens, watchtowers and towers of silence too. Place where worlds collide, flow in and out of one another, and washofy away. Place where an air-man can drowno in water, or else grow gills; where a water-creature can get drunk, but also chokeofy, on air.

And that must be his Alleluia, his Icequeen Cone!

The world of books continued to send him messages. Bharati Mukherjee and Clark Blaise wrote from America to tell him that people were making I AM SALMAN RUSHDIE button badges and proudly wearing them as a sign of their solidarity. He wanted one of those badges. Maybe Joseph Anton could wear a badge in solidarity with the person he both was and was not. Gita Mehta told him by telephone, a little waspishly, that "The Satanic Verses is not your Lear. Shame is your Lear.

An eighteen-year age gap had turned out to be a good place to dump most of the problems that can sometimes crop up between brothers

Pandora, possessed by the unleashed contents of her box.

Giderken koÅŸullar ne kadar ac? olursa olsun, sonunda dönebildiÄŸiniz yer evinizdir.

Memory's truth, because memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else's version more than his own.

For an instant, silence, nosier than a waterfall.

What sort of god could be excused the actions of his followers? Didn't it, in a way, infantilise the deity to say he was powerless against the faithful?

I've got tattoos, I'm subculture. Some kind of post-teen bag lady, that's me.

Any new idea is asked two questions. The first is asked when it's weak: What kind of an idea are you? Are you the kind the compromises, does deals, accommodates itself to society? Aims to find a niche to survive? Or are you the cursed, bloody-minded ram rod type of damn fool notion that would rather break than sway with the breeze? The kind, that almost certainly, ninety-nine times out of a hundred , be smashed to bits, but the hundredth time will change the world?

Between the adored and the adorer falls the shadow.

It was on the Wednesday after the great storm that Mr. Geronimo first noticed that his feet no longer touched the ground.

God is love; and the Hindu love-god, Krishna, is always depicted with blue skin. Tell them blue; it will be a sort of bridge between the faiths; gently does it, you follow; and besides blue is a neutral sort of colour, avoids the usual Colour problems, gets you away from black and white: yes, on the whole I'm sure it's the one to choose.

I also hoped that my own track record, the things I'd written, the work I'd done, the person I had been, would be my best defense against the demonization of my character and motives that was taking place. But those were thoughts from before the time in which we all became too frightened of religion in general and one particular religion in particular—religion redefined as the capacity of religionists to commit earthly violence in the name of their unearthly sky god.

In a time of constant transformation, beatitude is the joy that comes with belief, with certainty.

Y es que acababa de ver emerger del remolino de las nubes la figura de una seductora mujer de cierta edad, con sari de brocado verde y oro, brillante en la nariz y moño alto perfectamente defendido por la laca contra la presión del viento de las alturas, que viajaba cómodamente sentada en alfombra volante.

Human life was lived between two chasms, a Russian writer had said, the one that preceded our birth, "the cradle rocks above an abyss," and the one we were all "heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour).

Her thoughts, loosen by solitude, often burst these days through her unconscious lips; and often contradict one another (...)

Ez az istenimádat-dolog, az énnek e megtagadása a Mindenható színe elÅ'tt csak figyelemelterelés, hamis nyom. Akárhol rejlik is a jóság, semmikép nem egy istenségnek szóló szertartásos, gondolkodás nélküli tiszteletadásban, hanem inkább az egyéni vagy közös út lassú, esetlen, hibákkal tarkított keresésében.

the art of the novel revealed anything, it was that human nature was the great constant, in any culture, in any place, in any time, and that, as Heraclitus had said two thousand years earlier, a man's ethos, his way of being in the world, was his daimon, the guiding principle that shaped his life – or, in the pithier, more familiar formulation of the idea, that character was destiny.

I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought. I have to go back soon, she told herself, I need to reclaim it or it will be gone, I will be gone from it, and nobody will mourn my loss. She thought about Wile E. Coyote rushing out over the chasm and not falling until he looked down. That's me, her weak voice thought, and then her strong voice answered, Then don't look down.