Salman Rushdie: Trending quotes

“Realism can break a writer's heart.”

Source: The Satanic Verses

Salman Rushdie Shame

Source: Shame

“The world, somebody wrote, is the place we prove real by dying in it.”

“‎No people whose word for 'yesterday' is the same as their word for 'tomorrow' can be said to have a firm grip on the time.”

Source: The Satanic Verses (1988)

“Perhaps the story you finish is never the one you begin.”

Source: Midnight's Children

“What can't be cured must be endured.”

“So India’s problem turns out to be the world’s problem. What happened in India has happened in God’s name.

The problem’s name is God.”

The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Part II
Source: Midnight's Children

“Children are the vessels into which adults pour their poison.”

Source: The Satanic Verses

“We were language's magpies by nature, stealing whatever sounded bright and shiny.”

Source: Midnight's Children (1981)

Salman Rushdie The Ground Beneath Her Feet

Source: The Ground Beneath Her Feet

“Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.”

“Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems - but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible.”

“To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world.”

Source: Midnight's Children

“Not all possibilities are open to us. The world is finite; our hopes spill over its rim.”

Variant: To understand just one life you have to swallow the world... do you wonder, then, that I was a heavy child?
Source: Midnight's Children

“I learned: the first lesson of my life: nobody can face the world with his eyes open all the time.”

Source: The Satanic Verses

“Vertigo is the conflict between the fear of falling and the desire to fall.”

Source: Midnight's Children

“Question: What is the opposite of faith?

Not disbelief. Too final, certain, closed. Itself is a kind of belief.

Doubt.”

“We crave permission openly to become our secret selves.”

Source: The Satanic Verses

Salman Rushdie book The Moor's Last Sigh

Source: The Moor's Last Sigh

“I want more than what I want. (Vina Apsara)”

Salman Rushdie The Ground Beneath Her Feet

Source: The Ground Beneath Her Feet

“We are described into corners, and then we must describe ourselves out of corners.”

“When you throw everything up in the air anything becomes possible.”