1,092 Quotes by Salman Rushdie

One of the extraordinary things about human events is that the unthinkable becomes thinkable.

History could claw upward as well as down. The powerful could be deafened by the cries of the poor.

I used to say, 'There is a God-shaped hole in me.' For a long time I stressed the absence, the hole. Now I find it is the shape which has become more important.

One of the things a writer is for is to say the unsayable, speak the unspeakable and ask difficult questions.

Madame Bovary and a flying carpet, they are both untrue in the same way. Somebody made them up.

We all dream things into being; you imagine yourself having a child, and then you have a child. An inventor will think of something in his mind and then make it actual. So things are often passing from the imagined realm into the real world.

In spite of all evidence that life is discontinuous, a valley of rifts, and that random chance plays a great part in our fates, we go on believing in the continuity of things, in causation and meaning. But we live on a broken mirror, and fresh cracks appear in its surface every day.

The suicide bomber's imagination leads him to believe in a brilliant act of heroism, when in fact he is simply blowing himself up pointlessly and taking other people's lives.

Hell is other people's fantasies...