Quotes from Salman Rushdie

A kind of India happens everywhere, that's the truth too; everywhere is terrible and wonder-filled and overwhelming if you open your sense to the actual's pulsating beat.

So he was a sort of anti-Scheherazade, Dunia told him, the exact opposite of the storyteller of The Thousand Nights and One Night: her stories saved her life, while his put his life in danger.

So it was, and so imperially attired they went away from the Gardens, away from that house weighed down by death into the parade that celebrated life; and so, running toward life and any from death, they found death waiting for them, as the old story had prophesied, in Samarra, which was to say, on Sixth Avenue between Fourth Street and Washington Place. Death in a Joker costume carrying an AR-15.(...) Guns were alive in America and death was their random gift

They had been married in the Rhodopé Building looking out at the glory of the park. They honeymooned in the same private universe and needed nothing more, neither Venice nor the Hatsheput Temple nor an island in the sun.

Confucius: If you sit by the river for long enough, the body of your enemy will float by.

We can't deny the ubiquity of faith. If we write in such a way as to prejudge such belief as in some way deluded or false, then are we not guilty of elitism, of imposing our world-view on the masses?

And all the time she held on to me; like a mother protecting her child, she shielded me from my family. (Who were learning … as I was … that they were not …)

After August 1958, the world continued to spin; but the world of my childhood had, indeed, come to an end. Padma—did you have, when you were little, a world of your own? A tin orb on which were imprinted the continents and oceans and polar ice? Two cheap metal hemispheres, clamped together by a plastic stand? No, of course not; but I did.

That's how it was when I was ten: nothing but trouble outside my head, nothing but miracles inside it.

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, I still do not understand, why the many accept this oppression

nobody can face the world with his eyes open all the time.

Your world, my world, all worlds,' came the reply. 'They are all there to be Ruled. And inside every single story, inside every Stream in the Ocean, there lies a world, a story-world, that I cannot Rule at all.

Earthquakes, I point out, have always made men eager to placate the gods. After the great Lisbon earthquake of November 1, 1755—that catastrophe which Voltaire saw as an irrefutable argument for the tragic view of life and against Leibnizian optimism—the locals decided on a propitiatory auto-da-fé.

I have been a swallower of lives; and to know me, just the one of me, you'll have to swallow the lot as well.

There was a deep, sad wound in him, because he was a defeated man

A live dog is better than a dead lion, but death is preferable to poverty.

Now the only person you think is lying to you is the expert who actually knows something. He's the one not to believe because he's the elite and the elites are against the people

The gods, I correct her. Monotheism sucks, like all despotisms. The species is naturally, democratically, polytheistic, apart from that evolutionary elite which has dispensed with the divine requirement entirely. You instinctively want the gods to be many because you are One.

Montgomery Clift in I Confess?

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." Yes:

In the grave I can tell you the truth. I am your own Dunia, but I am also a princess of the jinnias or jiniri. The slits in the world are reopening, so I can come back to see you

We are creatures of air, Our roots in dreams And clouds, reborn In flight.

I'm lucky yes I am don't argue I'm the luckiest bastard in the world. And: how wonderful it was to have before him the stretching, shady avenue of years, the prospect of growing old in the presence of her gentleness.

At the beginning of all love there is a private treaty each of the lovers makes with himself or herself, an agreement to set aside what is wrong with the other for the sake of what is right.