“Life is elsewhere. Cross frontiers. Fly away.”
— Salman Rushdie
“Madame Bovary and a flying carpet, they are both untrue in the same way. Somebody made them up.”
“She’s no flibberti-gibberti mamzell, but a whir-stir-get-lost-sir bundla dynamite!”
“A sigh isn’t just a sigh. We inhale the world and breathe out meaning. While we can. While we can.”
“Sometimes, people trying to commit suicide manage it in a manner that leaves them breathless with astonishment.”
“Literature is the one place in any society where, within the secrecy of our own heads, we can hear voices talking about everything in every possible way.”
“He knew what he knew: that the real world was full of magic, so magical worlds could easily be real.”
“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.”
“Our lives disconnect and reconnect, we move on, and later we may again touch one another, again bounce away. This is the felt shape of a human life, neither simply linear nor wholly disjunctive nor endlessly bifurcating, but rather this bouncey-castle sequence of bumpings-into and tumblings-apart.”
“Things, even people have a way of leaking into each other like flavours when you cook.”
“One of the reasons my name is Rushdie is that my father was an admirer of Ibn Rush’d, the 12th century Arab philosopher known as Averroes in the West. In his time, he was making the non-literalist case for interpreting the Koran.”
“I seem to have fallen for women with missing parents. Goodness knows what it signifies.”
“My love for Dan Brown knows no bounds. It literally has no mass.”
“I learned: the first lesson of my life: nobody can face the world with his eyes open all the time.”
“I admit it: above all things, I fear absurdity.”
“I don’t think people cry reading ‘Midnight’s Children,’ but a lot of people seem to cry watching the movie.”
“Home has become such a scattered, damaged, various concept in our present travails. There is so much to yearn for. There are so few rainbows any more.”
“What kind of Christmas present would Jesus ask Santa for?”
“I used to say, ‘There is a God-shaped hole in me.’ For a long time I stressed the absence, the hole. Now I find it is the shape which has become more important.”
“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.”
“Actually, I don’t even like parties. I would much prefer a room with four friends who sit around and have dinner. I detest nightclubs. And I don’t like places where the noise is so loud you can’t talk to people.”
“If there is a choice between absolute safety and freedom, then freedom must always prevail.”
“British society has never been cleansed of the filth of imperialism.”
“If my child had prejudice in his head, I’d be ashamed. I would see it as my failure as a parent.”
“When I was writing ‘The Satanic Verses,’ if you had asked me about the phenomenon that we all now know as radical Islam, I wouldn’t have had much to say. As recently as the mid-1980s, it didn’t seem to be a big deal.”
“Where there is no belief, there is no blasphemy.”
“Children are the vessels into which adults pour their poison.”
“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.”
“Live on, survive, for the earth gives forth wonders. It may swallow your heart, but the wonders keep on coming. You stand before them bareheaded, shriven. What is expected of you is attention.”
“Five mysteries hold the keys to the unseen: the act of love, and the birth of a baby, and the contemplation of great art, and being in the presence of death or disaster, and hearing the human voice lifted in song.”
“Don’t you know girls have to fool people every day of their lives if they want to get anywhere?”
“One minute you’ve got a lucky star watching over you and the next instant it’s done a bunk.”
“What grows best in the heat: fantasy; unreason; lust.”
“In early Islam, it was an absolute tenet that the prophet was not to be worshipped. The prophet was a messenger. And one of the things that’s happened in Islam is this cult of the prophet, which to my view is counter to the original tradition.”
“If you take a look at history, you will find that the understanding of what is good and evil has always existed before the individual religions. The religions were only invented by people afterwards, in order to express this idea.”
“Human beings do not perceive things whole; we are not gods but wounded creatures, cracked lenses, capably only of fractured perceptions. Partial beings, in all the senses of that phrase.”
“Friendships are the family we make – not the one we inherit. I’ve always been someone to whom friendship, elective affinities, is as important as family.”
“A thing that happens to migrants is that they lose many of the traditional things which root identity, which root the self.”
“The First Amendment defends all forms of speech including hate speech, which is why groups like Ku Klux Klan are allowed to utter their poisonous remarks.”
“Speaking as somebody with three sisters and a very largely female Muslim family, there is not a single woman I know in my family or in their friends who would have accepted the wearing of a veil.”
“A photograph is a moral decision taken in one eighth of a second, or one sixteenth, or one one-hundred-and-twenty-eighth. Snap your fingers; a snapshot’s faster.”
“India, the new myth – a collective fiction in which anything was possible, a fable rivalled only by the two other mighty fantasies: money and God.”
“Human beings, you see, do absolutely two primary things. We see like and unlike. Like becomes, in literature, simile and metaphor. Unlike becomes uniqueness and difference, from which I believe, the novel is born.”
“One of the things I’ve thought about ‘Midnight’s Children’ is that it is a novel which puts a Muslim family at the centre of the Indian experience.”
“An attack upon our ability to tell stories is not just censorship – it is a crime against our nature as human beings.”
“No story comes from nowhere; new stories are born from old.”
“So India’s problem turns out to be the world’s problem. What happened in India has happened in God’s name. The problem’s name is God.”
“The West should be tougher on Pakistan. It is trying to play both ends against the middle – to look like the friend of the revolutionaries on the one hand and a friend of the West in the fight against terrorism. It can’t be both things.”
“Your blasphemy, Salman, can’t be forgiven. To set your words against the Words of God.”
“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.”
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