Quotes from Salman Rushdie

Here in America, the only words that didn't exist, the only unspeakable words, were "I'm not sure about any of this. I'm having second thoughts.

Time passes. Big men dwindle, small men grow. This man shrinks into old age, those men's reach grows longer. They can stretch out their arms and touch places and people they couldn't reach before. There are companies here to lend assistance to companies there, to facilitate journeys, to execute strategies. Clowns become kings, old crowns lie in the gutter. Things change. It is the way of the world.

The idea that any kind of free society can be constructed in which people will never be offended or insulted, or in which they have the right to call on the law to defend them against being offended or insulted, is absurd... The moment you say that an idea system is sacred, the moment you declare a set of ideas to be immune from criticism, satire, derision, or contempt, freedom of thought becomes impossible.

Mândria r?nit? este suferinÈ›a din care-È›i revii cel mai greu, c?ci o fractur? la demnitatea È™i stima de sine a omului e mult mai grav? decât una la picior, iar vindecarea dureaz? È™i ea mult mai mult.

all over India policemen were arresting people, all opposition leaders except members of the pro-Moscow Communists, and also schoolteachers lawyers poets newspapermen trade-unionists, in fact anyone who had ever made the mistake of sneezing during the Madam's speeches

Never make love to a woman who is bad with stained glass," the emperor said solemnly, giving no indication of humorous intent. "Such a woman is an ignorant shrew.

Ci offendiamo facilmente, mortalmente. Siamo arrivati a pensare che offendersi sia uno dei diritti fondamentali. Pochissime cose apprezziamo più della nostra indignazione, che ci dà, a parer nostro, la giustificazione morale. Dall'alto di questa posizione possiamo sparare ai nostri nemici e infliggere loro gravi perdite. Siamo fieri della nostra suscettibilità.

History is the consequence not only of people's actions, but also of their forgetfulness.

As a young man he had shared a room with a painter whose paintings had grown larger and larger as he tried to get the whole of life into his art.[...]The swollen events of the night of the crescent knives reminded Nadir Khan of his room-mate, because life had once again, perversely, refused to remain life-sized.

O, you can lecture me now, she laughed. You are the one with the high moral tone, that's a good one. It was you who left me, her voice reminded his ear, seeming to nibble at the lobe. It was you, O moon of my delight, who hid behind a cloud. And I in darkness, blinded, lost, for love.

Aurora's studio she stole three charcoal sketches of me as a young boy, sketches in which my ruined hand had been wondrously metamorphosed, becoming, variously, a flower, a paintbrush and a sword. Miss Jaya took these sketches to my Dilly's flat and said they were a gift from the 'young Sahib'. Then she told Aurora that she had seen the teacher pinching them, and, excuse me, Begum Sahib, but that woman's attitude to our boy is not a moral one.

They like the making of mischief, mayhem, anarchy. They have traditionally lacked management skills.

How does newness come into the world? How is it born? Of what fusions, translations, conjoinings is it made? How does it survive, extreme and dangerous as it is? What compromises, what deals, what betrayals of its secret nature must it make to stave off the wrecking crew, the exterminating angel, the guillotine? Is birth always a fall? Do angels have wings? Can men fly?

If you're serious about shaking off your foreignness, Salad baba, then don't fall into some kind of rootless limbo instead. Okay? We're all here. We're right in front of you. You should really try and make an adult acquaintance with this place, this time. Try and embrace this city, as it is, not some childhood memory that makes you both nostalgic and sick. Draw it close. The actually existing place.

It was plain he needed to love and be loved; there was a tide of emotion in him that needed to wash over people and he hoped for a returning tide to wash over him.

Winner of the "Booker of Bookers," Midnight's Children is the novel that can be said to have done for Indian literature what One Hundred Years of Solitude did for the literature of the Americas, exciting a boom whose echoes have yet to fade.

Anybody can tell stories,' Iff replied. 'Liars, and cheats, and crooks, for example. But for stories with that Extra Ingredient, ah, for those, even the best storytellers need the Story Waters. Storytelling needs fuel, just like a car; and if you don't have the Water, you just run out of Steam.

if one wishes to remain an individual in the midst of the teeming multitudes, one must make oneself grotesque.

By embracing the inescapable, I lost my fear of it. I'll tell you a secret about fear: it's an absolutist. With fear, it's all or nothing. Either, like any bullying tyrant, it rules your life with a stupid blinding omnipotence, or else you overthrow it, and its power vanishes in a puff of smoke. And another secret: the revolution against

I was born in the city of Bombay...once upon a time.

least a dozen times a day, darling,' she cried, 'we might

The question is, do you mean to do right by her? Do you mean well by her? Or is your desire so great that it overwhelms your sense of the right and the good?

Information got abolished sometime in the twentieth century, can't say just when; stands to reason, that's part of the information that got abolish, abolished. Since then we've been living in a fairy-story. Got me? Everything happens by magic. Us fairies haven't a fucking notion what's going on. So how do we know if it's right or wrong? We don't even know what it is.

when we read a book we like, or even love, we find ourselves in agreement with its portrait of human life. Yes, we say, this is how we are, this is what we do to one another, this is true. That, perhaps, is where literature can help most. We can make people agree, in this time of radical disagreement, on the truths of the great constant, which is human nature.