Quotes from Salman Rushdie

Music, love, death. Certainly a triangle of sorts; maybe even an eternal one. The only people who can see the whole picture, he murmured, are the ones who step out of the frame. (The ground beneath her feet.)

It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity.

Happy endings must come at the end of something,' the Walrus pointed out. 'If they happen in the middle of a story, or an adventure, or the like, all they do is cheer things up for awhile.

because silence, too, has an echo, hollower and longer-lasting than the reverberations of any sound.

In spite of all evidence that life is discontinuous, a valley of rifts, and that random chance plays a great part in our fates, we go on believing in the continuity of things, in causation and meaning. But we live on a broken mirror, and fresh cracks appear in its surface every day.

The lessons one learns at school are not always the ones the school thinks it's teaching.

Only under extreme pressure can we change into that which it is in our most profound nature to become . . . That is what people get wrong about transformation. We're not all shallow proteans, forever shifting shape. We're not science fiction. It's like when coal becomes diamond. It doesn't afterwards retain the possibility of change. Squeeze it as hard as you like, it won't turn into a rubber ball, or a Quattro Stagione pizza, or a self-portrait by Rembrandt. It's done .

Ignorantly is how we all fall in love; for it is a kind of fall. Closing our eyes, we leap from that cliff in hope of a soft landing. Nor is it always soft; but still, without that leap nobody comes to life.

Exile is a dream of a glorious return. Exile is a vision of revolution: Elba, not St Helena. It is an endless paradox: looking forward by always looking back. The exile is a ball hurled high into the air.

A book is not completed till it's read.

Everything has shape, if you look for it. There is no escape from form.

To be born again,' sang Gibreal Farishta tumbling from the heaveans, 'first you have to die. Ho ji! Ho ji! To land upon the bosomy earth, first one needs to fly Tat-taa! Takatun! How to ever smile again, if first you won't cry? How to win the darling's love mister, without a sigh?

What grows best in the heat: fantasy; unreason; lust.

optimism is a disease

There is nothing like a War for the reinvention of lives...

My parents gave me the gift of irreligion, of growing up without bothering to ask people what gods they held dear, assuming that in fact, like my parents, they weren't interested in gods, and that this uninterest was 'normal.' You may argue that the gift was a poisoned chalice, but even if so, that's a cup from which I'd happily drink again.

This is how we are: we fall in love with each other's strengths, but love deepens towards permanence when we fall in love with each other's weaknesses.

Sometimes we feel we straddle two cultures; at other times, that we fall between two stools.

Having been borne across the world, we are translated men. It is normally supposed that something always gets lost in translation; I cling, obstinately, to the notion that something can also be gained.

Only the foolish, blinded by language's conventions, think of fire as red or gold. Fire is blue at its melancholy rim, green in its envious heart. It may burn white, or even, in its greatest rages, black.

Make no mistake- you can change things. Question everything, take nothing for granted; argue with all received ideas, don't respect what does not deserve respect; speak your mind, don't censor yourself; use your imagination and express what it tells you to express. These are the weapons of the mind.

People don't like being around despair. Our tolerance for the truly hopeless, for those who are irredeemably broken by life is strictly limited. The sob stories we like are the ones that end before we're bored.

My horizon's have shrunk and I have only endings to write.

Repression is a seamless garment; a society which is authoritarian in its social and sexual codes, which crushes its women beneath the intolerable burdens of honour and propriety, breeds repressions of other kinds as well.