Quotes from Salman Rushdie

A people that has remained convinced of its greatness and invulnerability, that has chosen to believe such a myth in the face of all the evidence, is a people in the grip of a kind of sleep, or madness.

If love is a yearning to be like (even to become) the beloved, then hatred, it must be said, can be engendered by the same ambition, when it cannot be fulfilled.

This may be the curse of human race . Not that we are different from one anther , but we are so alike .

everything is relative, one man's absolute belief is another man's fairy tale;

All migrants leave their pasts behind, although some try to pack it into bundles and boxes-but on the journey something seeps out of the treasured mementoes and old photographs, until even their owners fail to recognize them, because it is the fate of migrants to be stripped of history, to stand naked amidst the scorn of strangers upon whom they see rich clothing, the brocades of continuity and the eyebrows of belonging..

What's the use of stories that aren't even true?

What had been (at the beginning) no bigger than a full stop had expanded into a comma, a word, a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter; now it was bursting into more complex developments, becoming, one might say, a book - perhaps an encylopaedia - even a whole language...

Don't you know girls have to fool people every day of their lives if they want to get anywhere?

I fell victim to the temptation of every autobiographer, to the illusion that since the past exists only in one's memories and the words which strive vainly to encapsulate them, it is possible to create past events simply by saying they occurred.

The inevitable triumph of illusion over reality that was the single most obvious truth about the history of the human race.

It is very, very easy not to be offended by a book. You just have to shut it.

My heart broke open and history fell in.

Nobody can judge an internal injury by the size of the superficial wound.

If I were asked for a one-sentence sound bite on religion, I would say I was against it.

Between shame and shamelessness lies the axis upon which we turn; meteorological conditions at both these poles are of the most extreme, ferocious type. Shamelessness, shame: the roots of violence.

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

I know that when people pull apart, they usually employ misunderstanding as a weapon, deliberately getting hold of the stick's wrong end, impaling themselves on its point in order to prove the perfidy of the other.

When you know what you're against you have taken the first step to discovering what you're for.

At sixteen, you still think you can escape from your father. You aren't listening to his voice speaking through your mouth, you don't see how your gestures already mirror his; you don't see him in the way you hold your body, in the way you sign your name. You don't hear his whisper in your blood.

Life is lived forward but is judged in reverse.

One either loves, or waits for love, or banishes love for good. That is the full range of possible choices.

For an instant, silence, noisier than a waterfall.

It is all for love. Which is a wonderful and dashing matter. But which can also be a very foolish thing.

Once you have been in an earthquake you know, even if you survive without a scratch, that like a stroke in the heart, it remains in the earth's breast, horribly potential, always promising to return, to hit you again, with an even more devastating force.