Quotes from Salman Rushdie

In a Bombay street an urchin was distributing business cards. He took one. 'Are you alcohol?' it read. 'We can help. Call this number for liquor home delivery.' Excellent business model, he thought.

A camera requires law, order, the thin blue line.

But now, discontinuity ruled. Yesterday meant nothing and could not help you build tomorrow. Life had become a series of vanishing photographs, posted every day, gone the next. One had no story anymore. Character, narrative, history, were all dead. Only the flat caricature of the instant remained, and that was what one was judged by. To have lived long enough to witness the replacement of the depth of her chosen world's culture by its surfaces was a sad thing.

Putting both your hands in your pockets was against the rules. So was 'running in the corridors'. However, fagging – acting as an older boy's unpaid servant – and beating were still permitted. Corporal punishment could be administered by the housemaster or even by the boy named as Head of House.

Ich würde lieber im Kampf um große Dichter sterben als in einem Krieg um Götter.

Rani, too, was perpetuating memories. Harappa the martyr, the demigod, lived on in his daughter's thoughts; but no two sets of memories ever match, even when their subject is the same (...)

said, think of life as a novel, let's say a novel of four hundred pages, and then imagine how many pages in the book your story has already covered.

Prejudice, mostly,' Allie said, lying curled around Gibreel beneath parachute silk. 'They can't quantify the will, so they leave it out of their calculations. But it's will that gets you up Everest, will and anger, and it can bend any law of nature you care to mention, at least in the short term, gravity not excluded. If you don't push your luck, anyway.

The camera sees broken windows.

Politics, children: at the best of times a bad dirty business. We should have avoided it, I should never have dreamed of purpose, I am coming to the conclusion that privacy, the small individual lives of men, are preferable to all this inflated macrocosmic activity. But too late. Can't be helped. What can't be cured must be endured.

imagined world behind our eyelids can drip its magic into the world we see when we open our eyes.

En aquella metrópoli de lenguas y cuchicheos, ni los oídos más finos oían algo fidedigno

That's the least of it. The most of it is, he was always careless with people's hearts. He never took any responsibility for what he broke.

They say women have a much higher pain threshold. They say it's because we are the ones who have to go through childbirth. I say it's because women have a much higher everything than most men.

This is what loss was, what death was: an escape into the luminous wave-forms, into the ineffable speed of the light-years and the parsecs, the eternally receding distances of the cosmos.

El verdadero atractivo del mal es la seductora facilidad con la que uno puede aventurarse por ese camino

Suspiro ergo sum.

We live in a world of disappointment. You begin with high hopes and the beautiful innocence of childhood but you discover that the world isn't good enough, nor are our lives and nor are we. But there are moments in life when we can have an experience of transcendence, feel part of something larger, or simply our hearts burst inside.

This is how religions shore up dictators; by encircling them with words of power, words which the people are reluctant to see discredited, disenfranchised, mocked.

Bir iç çekiÅŸ yaln?zca iç çekiÅŸ deÄŸildir. Dünyay? içimize çekeriz, soluÄŸumuzla birlikte d?? dünyaya anlam da veririz. YapabildiÄŸimiz sürece. YapabildiÄŸimiz kadar?yla.

Para volver a nacer, antes tienes que morir.

A compulsory ocean sounds worse than a forbidden well.

People called him paranoiac and he accepted the label. He had a whole theory of paranoia. I don't think he remembers that now. He said paranoia was to be understood as essentially optimistic, because the paranoid believed that there was a meaning to events, that the world made sense, even though that sense was concealed.

The road is always unreliable," the sandwich lady said. "It'll twist and turn on you. It'll duck and swerve and land you where you don't expect and you got no business being. You need your wits about you if you want to ride the road.