Quotes from Salman Rushdie

IS IT POSSIBLE to be jealous of written words? To resent nocturnal scribblings as though they were the very flesh and blood of a sexual rival?

music was what he feared and hated most, because music slid beneath the thinking mind to seize the heart;

The people who kill your children are the people who's children were playing with your children yesterday. That's one of the most mysterious things about the 'flip' into hatred. You don't hate the people who are strangers to you because that creates a kind of indifference; you hate the people who live next door… It's a curious thing that love and hate are so closely tied together that just a flip of the coin can flip one into the other.

But what, after all, can a baby do except swallow all of it and hope to make sense of it later?

He listened unhappily until at length the blind man asked the thin air a question: 'I hope, perhaps, you may also remember me? A little? On occasion?' Then came a silence; a dry laugh; the sound of a man sitting down, heavily, all of a sudden.

yes, bitterness; cynicism. it was a wonderful thing I did. deeper truth, bringing you the devil. yes, that sounds like me

El emigrante, por el contrario, puede prescindir totalmente del viaje; no es más que un mal necesario; lo que importa es llegar.

Bread and books: food for the body and food for the soul - what could be more worthy of our respect, and even love?

The light of the fire dying in the water like a dream being forgotten.

She had turned away from her sexuality, her instincts having warned her that to do otherwise might be to be absorbed by it; that it was for her, would always be, a big subject, a whole dark continent to map, and she wasn't prepared to go that way, be that explorer, chart those shores: not any more, or, maybe, not yet.

She made only one educational stipulation: religious instruction. Unlike Aziz, who was racked by ambiguity, she had remained devout. 'You have your Hummingbird,' she told him, 'but I, whatsitsname, have the Call of God. A better noise, whatsitsname, than that man's hum.' It was one of her rare political comments… and then the day arrived when Aziz threw out the religious tutor.

You can't keep a devil locked up in the attic and expect to keep it to yourself forever.

And to prove to himself the non-existence of God, he now stood in the dining-hall of the city's most famous hotel, with pigs falling out of his face.

When you were your own quarry, when the material you were dredging up lay buried in the caverns of the self, a time came when there was only an emptiness left.

One day, perhaps, the world may taste the pickles of history. They may be too strong for some palates, their smell may be overpowering, tears may rise to eyes; I hope nevertheless that it will be possible to say of them that they posses the authentic taste of truth...that they are, despite everything, acts of love.

Similarities between this and that, between apparently unconnected things, make us clap our hands delightedly when we find them out. It is a sort of national longing for form – or perhaps simply an expression of our deep belief that forms lie hidden within reality; that meaning reveals itself only in flashes. Hence our vulnerability to omens..

Alles is strategie. Dat is de wijsheid van de spin. Alles is voedsel. Dat is de wijsheid van de haai.

This is not what I had planned; but perhaps the story you finish is never the one you begin. (Once

Sus piernas terminaban todavía en aquellas lamentables pezuñas, y los cuernos de su frente eran tan agudos como antes...».

In the end, rage, no matter how profoundly justified, destroys the enraged. Just as we are created anew by what we love, so we are reduced and unmade by what we hate. At

In the world of the real I had learned hard lessons. Lies can cause tragedies, both on the personal and the national scale. Lies can defeat the truth.

She has vivid pictures of Hell. It is as hot as Rajputana in June and everyone is made to learn seven foreign languages …

We became lazy, she said. For eight years we persuaded ourselves that the progressive, tolerant, adult America embodied by the president was what America had become, that it would just go on being like that. And that America is still there but the dark side was still there too, and it roared out of its cage and swallowed us. America's secret identity wasn't a superhero. Turns out it was a supervillain.

The question of essences remains at the heart of the adaptive act; how to make a second version of a first thing, of a book or film or poem or vegetable, or of yourself, that is successfully its own new thing and yet carries with it the essence, the spirit, the soul of the first thing, the thing that you yourself, or your book or poem or film or your mango or lime, originally were.