1,092 Quotes by Salman Rushdie

let me belong again to that faraway place I left so long ago, from which I am alienated, and which has forgotten me, in which I am an alien now even though it was the place where I began, let me belong again, walk those streets knowing they are mine, knowing that my story is a part of those streets, even though it isn't, it hasn't been for most of a lifetime, let it be so, let it be so

His father said to him: 'See now. You pay your way. I've made a man of you.' But what man That's what fathers never know. Not in advance. Not until it's too late

OK, publishing a book and releasing a movie is all very well, but Tottenham beating Man. U. 3-2... priceless.

If by some bizarre chance there turns out to be a god [...], I'm willing to bet he's an atheist too.

Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can't forgive.

She let herself go physically: That has to be said. She became--there is not a polite way of putting this--blowsy. She sagged; for all her good works, her body became the emblem and manifestation of her grief.

This is what loss was, what death was: an escape into the luminous wave-forms, into the ineffable speed of the light-years and the parsecs, the eternally receding distances of the cosmos.

...[A]nswers are easier to come by, and less reliable, than questions. If religion is an answer, if political ideology is an answer, then literature is an inquiry; great literature, by asking extraordinary questions, opens new doors in our minds.

human beings do not perceive things whole; we are not gods but wounded creatures, cracked lenses, capable only of fractured perceptions