1,092 Quotes by Salman Rushdie

perhaps, if one wishes to remain an individual in the midst of the teeming multitudes, one must make oneself grotesque.

She allowed history to leave her without trying to hold it back, the way children allow a grand parade to pass, holding it in their memory, making it an unforgettable thing, making it their own

Unnerved by Miss Salma R's temporal absolutism, the clocks gave up arguing and stopped trying to run the hours in the normal fashion, so that when people looked in their direction to see what the time was, the clocks showed them whatever time they wanted it to be, and in spite of the chronometric havoc that was created by this abdication they still permitted everyone to get home on time.

Cuidado con el hombre de acción que por fin desea progresar por medio del pensamiento. Un poco de pensamiento es algo peligroso.

[H]as it really been so long since religions persecuted people, burning them as heretics, drowning them as witches, that you can't recognize religious persecution when you see it?"[1,000 Days 'Trapped Inside a Metaphor' (Columbia University / The New York Times, December 12, 1991)]

What kind of God is it who's upset by a cartoon in Danish?"[Interview with Bill Moyers, Bill Moyers on Faith & Reason, June 23, 2006]

Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts.

The people who kill your children are the people who’s children were playing with your children yesterday. That’s one of the most mysterious things about the 'flip' into hatred. You don’t hate the people who are strangers to you because that creates a kind of indifference; you hate the people who live next door… It’s a curious thing that love and hate are so closely tied together that just a flip of the coin can flip one into the other.

Everyone had learned that it was worth giving up privacy for the merest possibility of fame, and the idea that only a private self was truly autonomous and free had be lost in the static of the airwaves.