Quotes from Salman Rushdie

Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.

A sigh isn't just a sigh. We inhale the world and breathe out meaning. While we can. While we can.

Not all possibilities are open to us. The world is finite; our hopes spill over its rim.

Question: What is the opposite of faith? Not disbelief. Too final, certain, closed. Itself is a kind of belief. Doubt.

He knew what he knew: that the real world was full of magic, so magical worlds could easily be real.

We crave permission openly to become our secret selves.

The moment you say that any idea system is sacred, whether it's a religious belief system or a secular ideology, the moment you declare a set of ideas to be immune from criticism, satire, derision, or contempt, freedom of thought becomes impossible. [ Defend the right to be offended ( openDemocracy , 7 February 2005)]

Vertigo is the conflict between the fear of falling and the desire to fall.

Nothing comes from nothing, Thieflet; no story comes from nowhere; new stories are born from old--it is the new combinations that make them new.

When you throw everything up in the air anything becomes possible.

I want more than what I want. (Vina Apsara)

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

Meaning is a shaky edifice we build out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old fillms, small victories, people hated, people loved; perhaps it is because our sense of what is the case is constructed from such inadequate materials that we defend it so fiercely, even to death.

We are described into corners, and then we must describe ourselves out of corners.

Fundamentalism isn't about religion, it's about power.

Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can't forgive.

Things, even people have a way of leaking into each other like flavours when you cook.

How to forgive the world for its beauty, which merely disguises its ugliness; for its gentleness, which merely cloaks its cruelty; for its illusion of continuity, seamlessly, as the night follows the day, so to speak- whereas in reality life is a series of brutal raptures, falling upon your defenseless hands, like the blows of a woodman's axe?

Make as much racket as you like people. Noise is life and an excess of noise is a sign that life is good. There will be time for us all to be quiet when we are safely dead.

When...did it become irrational to dislike religion, any religion, even to dislike it vehemently? When did reason get redescribed as unreason? When were the fairy stories of the superstitious placed above criticism, beyond satire? A religion was not a race. It was an idea, and ideas stood (or fell) because they were strong enough (or too weak) to withstand criticism, not because they were shielded from it. Strong ideas welcomed dissent.

What you were is forever who you are.

The moment you say that any idea system is sacred, whether it's a religious belief system or a secular ideology, the moment you declare a set of ideas to be immune from criticism, satire, derision, or contempt, freedom of thought becomes impossible.

For every snake, there is a ladder; for every ladder,a snake

An iceberg is water striving to be land; a mountain, especially a Himalaya, especially Everest, is land's attempt to metamorphose into sky; it is grounded in flight, the earth mutated--nearly--into air, and become, in the true sense, exalted. Long before she ever encountered the mountain, Allie was aware of its brooding presence in her soul.