1,092 Quotes by Salman Rushdie

Impossible stories, stories with No Entry signs on them, change our lives, and our minds, as often as the authorized versions, the stories we are expected to trust, upon which we are asked, or told, to build our judgements, and our lives.

The only privilege literature deserves – and this privilege it requires in order to exist – is the privilege of being in the arena of discourse, the place where the struggle of our languages can be acted out.

The lessons one learns at school are not always the ones the school thinks it’s teaching.

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.

The thing I really like about Twitter is the speed with which information reaches me. You find out things from Twitter long before they’re on the news. That, I think, is valuable.

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.

Reading is a very different thing than performing. In fact, one of the things I think that doesn’t work in books on tape is if the person doing the reading “acts” too much; it becomes irritating to you listening to it.

In the end, rage, no matter how profoundly justified, destroys the enraged.

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