Quotes About Salman Rushdie

At an English boarding school in the early 1960s, he quickly discovered, there were three bad mistakes you could make, but if you made only two of the three you could be forgiven. The mistakes were: to be foreign; to be clever; and to be bad at games […]. He made all three mistakes. He was foreign, clever, non-sportif.

But it was Genesis that got him, the Vulgate that was his namesake Saint Jerome's work. Genesis, especially chapter one, verse three. Dixitque Deus: fiat lux. Et facta est lux. Translated by himself into his personal Bombay "Wulgate": And God said, Cheap Italian motor car, beauty soap of the film star. And there was Lux. Please, Daddy, why did God want a small Fiat and a bar of soap, and also please, why did he get the soap only? Why couldn't he make the car?

I was born in the city of Bombay … once upon a time. No, that won't do, there's no getting away from the date: I was born in Doctor Narlikar's Nursing Home on August 15th, 1947. And the time? The time matters, too. Well then: at night. No, it's important to be more … On the stroke of midnight, as a matter of fact. Clock-hands joined palms in respectful greeting as I came.

Reason may catnap for a time, but the irrational is more often comatose. In the end it will be the irrational that is forever caged in dreams, while reason gains the day.

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

You be respectable, sister," she said, "Me, I'll be alive.

That's how it was when I was ten: nothing but trouble outside my head, nothing but miracles inside it.

The key to writing is concentration, not inspiration. It requires deep attention to your characters, to the world they live in, and to the story you have to tell.

a creature with white skin and green hair and bright, bright red lips

He called himself Hristo Dimitarov, but that was a nom de guerre constructed from the names of two celebrated Bulgarian soccer players

If the people of this nation understood our banking and monetary system, I believe there would be a revolution tomorrow morning.

But one thinks, also, of the parable of the scorpion and the frog. The scorpion acts according to its nature even when it is suicidal to do so. Additionally, or by way of confirmation, he is of brazen character, this fellow.

I thought, let the best minds of my generation soliloquize about power over some other poor woman's body, I'm off.

In exile, the furniture is ugly, expensive, all brought at the same time in the same store and in too much of a hurry[.]

yes, bitterness; cynicism. it was a wonderful thing I did. deeper truth, bringing you the devil. yes, that sounds like me

Bread and books: food for the body and food for the soul - what could be more worthy of our respect, and even love?

Fundamentalists of both religions had instantly sought injunctions banning the film from being shown

This thing: information got abolished sometime in the twentieth century, can't say just when; stands to reason, that's part of the information that got abolsh, abolished. Since then we've been living in a fairy-story.

You don't fight radical conservatism with not-quite-so radical conservatism.

The author of the Satanic Verses book [Salman Rushdie], which is against Islam, the Prophet, and the Koran, and all those involved in its publication who were aware of its content, are sentenced to death. I ask all Moslems to execute them wherever they find them.

What I've always tried to find in my books are points at which the private lives of the characters, and also my own, intersect with the public life of the culture.

The difference between memoir and autobiography, as far as I see it, is that a memoir is there primarily to tell one particular story, whereas an autobiography tries to be a full account of a life.

A postcolonial writer who has often been credited with mixing the mundane with the magical, and history with fiction, is Salman Rushdie.

I have always thought, the secret purpose of the book tour is to make the writer hate the book he's written. And, as a result, drive him to write another book.