Quotes from Salman Rushdie

Any story worth its salt can handle a little shaking up.

Freedom is not a tea party, India. Freedom is a war.

Without water we are nothing, the traveler thought. Even an emperor, denied water, would swiftly turn to dust. Water is the real monarch and we are all its slaves.

Wherever goodness lay, it did not lie in ritual, unthinking obeisance before a deity but rather, perhaps, in the slow clumsy, error-strewn working out of an individual or collective path.

Believe in your own eyes and you'll get into a lot of trouble, hot water, a mess.

Khattam-Shud,' he said slowly, 'is the Arch-Enemy of all Stories, even of language itself. He is the Prince of Silence and the Foe of Speech. And because everything ends, because dreams end, stories end, life ends, at the finish of everything we use his name. It's finished, we tell one another, it's over. Khattam-Shud: The End.

A little bit of one story joins onto an idea from another, and hey presto, . . . not old tales but new ones. Nothing comes from nothing.

A man who catches History's eye is thereafter bound to a mistress from whom he will never escape.

Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.

Travel was pointless. It removed you from the place in which you had a meaning, and to which you gave meaning in return by dedicating your life to it, and it spirited you away into fairylands where you were, and looked, frankly absurd.

Where there is no belief, there is no blasphemy.

You can get anywhere in Pakistan if you know people, even into jail.

Man is the Storytelling Animal, and that in stories are his identity, his meaning, and his lifeblood.

All true believers have good reasons for disbelieving in every god except their own,' said Birbal, 'and so it is they who, between them, give me all the reasons for believing in none.

You will see, as time goes by, said Ibn Rushd, that in the end it will be religion that will make men turn away from God. The godly are God's worst advocates.

She's no flibberti-gibberti mamzell, but a whir-stir-get-lost-sir bundla dynamite!

A little bird whispers in my ear: Be fair! Nobody, no country, has a monopoly of untruth.

Is birth always a fall?

in words and pickles, I have immortalized my memories, although distortions are inevitable in both methods. We must live, I'm afraid, with the shadows of imperfections.

When you pray for what you most want in the world, its opposite comes along with it. I was given a woman whom I truly loved and who truly loved me. The opposite side of such a love is the pain of its loss. I can only feel such pain today because until yesterday I knew that love.

In the end, rage, no matter how profoundly justified, destroys the enraged. Just as we are created anew by what we love, so we are reduced and unmade by what we hate.

I had become a kind of information magpie, gathering to myself all manner of shiny scraps of fact and hokum and books and art-history and politics and music and film, and developing, too, a certain skill in manipulating and arranging these pitiful shards so that they glittered and caught the light. Fool's gold, or priceless nuggets mined from my singular childhood's rich bohemian seam? I leave it to others to decide.

Maybe unhappiness is the continuum through which a human life moves, and joy just a series of blips, of islands in the stream.

Sometimes by a woodland stream he watched the water rush over the pebbled bed, its tiny modulations of bounce and flow. A woman's body was like that. If you watched it carefully enough you could see how it moved to the rhythm of the world, the deep rhythm, the music below the music, the truth below the truth. He believed in this hidden truth the way other men believed in God or love, believed that truth was in fact always hidden, that the apparent, the overt, was invariably a kind of lie.