Salman Rushdie Quotes (87 Quotes)

I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I'm gone which would not have happened if I had not come.

What you were is forever who you are.

Straight answers were beyond the powers of Rashid Khalifa, who would never take a short cut if there was a longer, twistier road available.

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.

What's real and what's true aren't necessarily the same.

The black ice of that dark fortress received the sunlight like a mortal wound.

I have been a swallower of lives; and to know me, just the one of me, you'll have to swallow the lot as well.

Why, alone of all the more-than-five-hundred-million, should I have to bear the burden of history?

They are the Eggheads. He is the Walrus.

I have been so-many too-many persons; life, unlike syntax, allows one more than three.

They drove past buses that dripped people the way a sponge drips water, and arrived at a thick forest of human beings, a crowd of people sprouting in all directions like leaves on jungle trees.

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.

A figure of speech is a shifty thing; it can be twisted or it can be straight.

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

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 heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else's version more than his own.

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.

After a winter's gestation in its eggshell of ice, the valley had beaked its way out into the open, moist and yellow.

Most of what matters in our lives takes place in our absence.

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

And my grandfather... was forever knocked into that middle place, unable to worship a God in whose existence he could not wholly disbelieve. Permanent alteration: a hole.

Religion was the glue of Pakistan, holding the halves together; just as consciousness, the awareness of oneself as a homogenous entity in time, a blend of past and present, is the glue of personality, holding together our then and our now.

He knew what he knew: that the real world was full of magic, so magical worls could easily be real.

Everything has shape, if you look for it. There is no escape from form.

The process of revision should be constant and endless

If you want pay, then just be gay.

Family history, of course, has its proper dietary laws. One is supposed to swallow and digest only the permitted parts of it, the halal portions of the past, drained of their redness, their blood. Unfortunately, this makes the stories less juicy...

There is nothing like a War for the reinvention of lives...

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

I admit it: above all things, I fear absurdity.

What can't be cured must be endured.