Quotes from Salman Rushdie

An enormous amount of modern ingenuity is expended," old G.K. opined, "on finding defenses for the indefensible conduct of the powerful

Anybody ever tries to tell you how this most beautiful and most evil of planets is somehow homogeneous, composed only of reconcilable elements, that it all adds up, you get on the phone to the straitjacket tailor.

One day the poor will have nothing left to eat except the rich

True is such a twentieth-century concept. The question is, can I get you to believe it, can I get it repeated enough times to make it as good as true.

I am of the nature to grow old. There is no way to escape it. I am of the nature to have ill health. There is no way to escape it. I am of the nature to die. There is no way to escape it. There is no way to escape being separated from everyone I love, and all that is dear to me. My actions are my only true belongings. My actions are the ground upon which I stand.

All true believers have good reasons for disbelieving in every god except their own," said Birbal, "and so it is they who, between them, give me all the reasons for believing in none.

men and women and members of the genders beyond and in between

Time had passed, it was hard to know how much time, because time was strange now, stretching, compressing, unreliable. A week could be a month long. A lifetime could pass in a day.

TO BE A LAWYER in a lawless time was like being a clown among the humorless: which was to say, either completely redundant or absolutely essential.

We are the creature that tells itself stories to understand what sort of creature it is.

Tai tapped his left nostril. 'You know what this is, Nakkoo? It's the place where the outside world meets the world inside you.

But one thinks, also, of the parable of the scorpion and the frog. The scorpion acts according to its nature even when it is suicidal to do so. Additionally, or by way of confirmation, he is of brazen character, this fellow.

To be imprisoned by the need to be loved was to be sealed in a cell in which one experienced an interminable torment and from which there was no escape.

It was almost a relief to arrive in the middle of other people's crises and leave the crisis of America behind. At home he had stopped listening to the news and avoided social media to shut out the daily nonsense as much as he could. He had his book to write, and this private crisis to deal with, the crisis of Sister, and that was all he could handle right now. The apocalypse of the West would just have to wait in line.

A man under the enchantment of love," the stowaway thought, "is a man easily distracted and led.

La belleza antigua no basta -dijo-. Antiguos lugares, comportamientos antiguos, dioses antiguos. Actualmente el mundo está lleno de preguntas, y hay formas nuevas de belleza.

Anything you want to be, you can be: You can be just what-all you want.

an egotist addicted to obsequiousness and sycophancy who nevertheless longed for a different world, a world in which he could find exactly that man who was his equal, whom he could meet as his brother, with whom he could speak freely, teaching and learning, giving and receiving pleasure, a world in which he could forsake the gloating satisfactions of conquest for the gentler yet more taxing joys of discourse. Did such a world exist? By what road could it be reached?

Epifania's first order was the most ancient wish of dynasts: that Carmen must conceive a male child, a king-in-waiting through whom his loving mother and grandmother would rule. Carmen, realising in her bitter consternation that this very first instruction would have to be disobeyed, lowered her eyes, muttered, 'Okay, Epifania Aunty, wish is my command,' and fled the room.

Boys," I mutter tolerantly across the years to Saleem-at-twenty-four, "will be boys.

Fifteen years old! Okay, okay. In our part of the world that's not so young.

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, to understand its mutability when it thinks itself immutable, to sense what's coming before others sense it, to know that the barbarian future is tearing down the gates of the present while others cling to the decadent, hollow past. If

the best defenses of those who are less against those who are more: inwardness, forethought, cunning, humility, and good peripheral vision. The many lessons of lessness.

Mourn for the living, the dead have got their camphor gardens.