Quotes from Salman Rushdie

because the trouble with trying to escape yourself is that you bring yourself along for the ride.

And, more prosaically, the water shortage had reached the point where milkmen could no longer find clean water with which to adulterate the milk …

The limitations we place upon the world are imposed by ourselves rather than the world.

A man is sane only to the extent that he subscribes to a previously-agreed construction of reality.

In exile, the furniture is ugly, expensive, all brought at the same time in the same store and in too much of a hurry[.]

Ask me how I can afford it." Riya fell into the trap and asked. "Oh, I'm now a transbillionaire," came the reply. "I identify as rich and so consequently I am.

Fact is,' he said without any of his usual bonhomie, 'religious fafaith, which encodes the highest ass ass aspirations of human race, is now, in our cocountry, the servant of lowest instincts, and gogo God is the creature of evil.

information, in a stream-of-consciousness soliloquy that revealed the extent to which he had internalised the adversarial fragmentation of American culture and made it a part of his personal damage.

When you have city eyes you cannot see the invisible people, the men with elephantiasis of the balls and the beggars in boxcars don't impinge on you, and the concrete sections of future drainpipes don't look like dormitories.

It's the difference, you see, between casual sex and love. The more you love, the more closely you get to know, the more profoundly you see, the more you are enriched.

Is the truth too poor a thing for us? Is any man innocent of embellishing it at times, or even of abandoning it entirely?

And look at the stains on the carpets, janum; for two months we must live like those Britishers? You've looked in the bathrooms? No water near the pot. I never believed, but it's true, my God, they wipe their bottoms with paper only! …

Hatred stupidity devotion greed the four horsemen of the new apocalypse.

London had grown unstable once again, revealing its true, capricious, tormented nature, its anguish of a city that had lost its sense of itself and wallowed, accordingly, in the impotence of its selfish, angry present of masks and parodies, stifled and twisted by the insupportable, unrejected burden of its past, staring into the bleakness of its impoverished future.

orphans know that their survival requires them to be prepared to do whatever is necessary. That there are no limits.

that the truth often lies below the surface, and a man may be a great deal more than his most easily caricatured characteristics

union of opposites to form human nature was just what human beings told themselves to rationalize away their imperfections. Maybe it was just too neat, and the truth was that evil deeds trumped good ones. It didn't matter, for example, that Hitler was kind to dogs.

A poet's work', he answers. 'To name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep.' And if rivers of blood flow from the cuts his verses inflict, then they will nourish him.

within minutes, the entire village was in the water, splashing about, falling over, getting up, moving steadily forwards towards the horizon; never looking back to shore ... come back, he beseeched his wife: nothing is happening. come back!

Here's a great lie, thinks the Grandee of Jahilia drifting into sleep: the pen is mightier than the sword.

Solid ground beneath his feet, dirt under his fingernails, the husbandry of growing things, bulbs and roots, seeds and shoots, this had been his world.

can honor be expected of a man who is preparing to storm the city of his birth?

Everybody forgets some small things, all the time!" But if small things go, will large things be close behind?

Fear was stronger than ethics, stronger than judgement, stronger than responsibility, stronger than civilisation. Fear was a bolting animal trampling children underfoot as it fled from itself. Fear was a bigot, a tyrant, a coward, a red mist, a whore. Fear was a bullet pointed at his heart.