“Most of what matters in our lives takes place in our absence.”
Author detail
Salman Rushdie was born in 1947 in Bombay to a Kashmiri family. He won the Booker Prize in 1981. Much of his fiction is set on the Indian subcontinent. His style is often classified as magical realism mixed with historical fiction, and a dominant theme of his work is the story of the many connections, disruptions and migrations between the Eastern and Western world.
Quotes
Showing 1-20 of 214
“Most of what matters in our lives takes place in our absence.”
“For a long while I have believed – this is perhaps my version of Sir Darius Xerxes Cama’s belief in a fourth function of outsideness – that in every generation there are a few souls, call th...”
0 likes
“No people whose word for 'yesterday' is the same as their word for 'tomorrow' can be said to have a firm grip on the time.”
“What kind of Christmas present would Jesus ask Santa for?”
0 likes
“He did not wish to be divine. If there had never been a God, the emperor thought, it might have been easier to work out what goodness was. This business of worship, of the abnegation of self...”
“From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Memory's truth, because memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its...”
“Fury...sexual, Oedipal, political, magical, brutal....drives us to our finest heights and coarsest depths”
0 likes
“A poet's work . . . to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep.”
0 likes
“He knew that his father had finally run hard enough and long enough to wear down the frontiers between the worlds, he had run clear out of his skin and into the arms of his wife, to whom he...”
“America, what happened to your optimism, your new frontiers, your simple Rockwell dreams? I'm plunging into your night, America, pushing myself deep into your heart like a knife, but the bla...”
0 likes
“...and as he aged and the world became less real he began to doubt his own beliefs, so that by the time he saw the God in whom he had never been able to believe or disbelieve he was probably...”
0 likes
“Go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets. Take a deep breath before you begin talking. Aim for the stars. Keep grinning. Be bloody-minded. Argue with the world. An...”
0 likes
“Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.”
0 likes
“Realism can break a writer's heart.”
0 likes
“Obviously, a rigid, blinkered, absolutist world view is the easiest to keep hold of, whereas the fluid, uncertain, metamorphic picture I've always carried about is rather more vulnerable. Ye...”
0 likes
“When a book leaves its author's desk it changes. Even before anyone has read it, before eyes other than its creator's have looked upon a single phrase, it is irretrievably altered. It has be...”
“If I were asked for a one-sentence sound bite on religion, I would say I was against it.”
0 likes