Quotes from Salman Rushdie

how he was going to die for his verses, but could not find it in himself to call the death-sentence unjust.

Philosophy, he jeered, was incapable of proving the existence of God, or even of proving the impossibility of there being two gods. Philosophy believed in the inevitability of causes and effects, which was a diminution of the power of God, who could easily intervene to alter effects and make causes ineffectual if he so chose.

Porque lo que crees depende de lo que has visto, no solo lo que es visible sino aquello que estás dispuesto a suponer.

I, too, have ropes around my neck, I have them to this day, pulling me this way and that, East and West, the nooses tightening, commanding, choose, choose. . . . Ropes, I do not choose between you. Lassoes, lariats, I choose neither of you, and both. Do you hear? I refuse to choose.

El futuro, a pesar de que no era más que un tenue resplandor envuelto en un interrogante, no se dejaba eclipsar por el pasado; incluso cuando la muerte avanza hacia el centro del escenario, la vida sigue luchando por la igualdad de derechos.

and do not speak to me, please, of African Eve or LUCA, the three-and-a-half-billion-year-old blob of goo that was our Last Universal Common Ancestor. I am aware of the family tree of the human race and of pre-Homo sap life on earth and to insist upon those genealogies now would be wilfully to miss my point.

People didn't like [my persistent existence]. Because I should have died. Now that I've almost died, everybody loves me. . . . That was my mistake, back then. Not only did I live but I tried to live well. Bad mistake. Get fifteen stab wounds, much better.

Everyone had learned that it was worth giving up privacy for the merest possibility of fame, and the idea that only a private self was truly autonomous and free had be lost in the static of the airwaves.

Our lives are not what we deserve; they are, let us agree, in many painful ways deficient. Song turns them into something else. Song shows us a world that is worthy of our yearning, it shows us our selves as they might be, if we were worthy of the world

If the old refused to die, the new could not be born.

Out of thin air: a big bang, followed by falling stars. A universal beginning, a miniature echo of the birth of time Ã¢â'¬Â¦ the jumbo jet Bostan, Flight AI-420, blew apart without any warning, high above

We all owe death a life.

Something was badly amiss with the spiritual life of the planet...Too many demons inside people claiming to believe in God.

You never know the answers to the questions of life until you are asked.

If a birth is the fall-out from the explosion caused by the union of two unstable elements, then perhaps a half-life is all we can expect.

Free speech is life itself.

I do have a lot of time for people in my life, and friendship is a very important subject for me. I think I'm unusual among the writers I know in that respect.

Life is lived forward but is judged in reverse.

The fact of being alive compensated for what life did to one.

'The Satanic Verses' was denied the ordinary life of a novel. It became something smaller and uglier: an insult.

It's a terrible thing that your life turns into a good story.

The world is about the way in which our dreams intersect with our real life. Endlessly, the world of the imagination changes the world.

I don't think there is a need for an entity like God in my life.

I learned: the first lesson of my life: nobody can face the world with his eyes open all the time.