“ Vertigo is the conflict between the fear of falling and the desire to fall. ”
- Salman Rushdie- Copy
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“ For a long while I have believed – this is perhaps my version of Sir Darius Xerxes Cama’s belief in a fourth function of outsideness – that in every generation there are a few souls, call them lucky or cursed, who are simply born not belonging, who come into the world semidetached, if you like, without strong affiliation to family or location or nation or race; that there may even be millions, billions of such souls, as many nonbelongers as belongers, perhaps; that, in sum, the phenomenon may be as “natural” a manifestation of human nature as its opposite, but one that has been mostly frustrated, throughout human history, by lack of opportunity. And not only by that: for those who value stability, who fear transience, uncertainly, change, have erected a powerful system of stigmas and taboos against rootlessness, that disruptive, antisocial force, so that we mostly conform, we pretend to be motivated by loyalties and solidarities we do not really feel, we hide our secret identities beneath the false skins of those identities which bear the belongers’ seal of approval. But the truth leaks out in our dreams; alone in our beds (because we are all alone at night, even if we do not sleep by ourselves), we soar, we fly, we flee. And in the waking dreams our societies permit, in our myths, our arts, our songs, we celebrate the nonbelongers, the different ones, the outlaws, the freaks. What we forbid ourselves we pay good money to watch, in a playhouse or a movie theater, or to read about between the secret covers of a book. Our libraries, our palaces of entertainment tell the truth. The tramp, the assassin, the rebel, the thief, the mutant, the outcast, the delinquent, the devil, the sinner, the traveler, the gangster, the runner, the mask: if we did not recognize in them our leastfulfilled needs, we would not invent them over and over again, in every place, in every language, in every time. ”
- Salman Rushdie- Copy
- 3K
“ 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. ”
- Salman Rushdie- Copy
- 52
“ He did not wish to be divine. If there had never been a God, the emperor thought, it might have been easier to work out what goodness was. This business of worship, of the abnegation of self in the face of the Almighty, was a distraction, a false trail. Wherever goodness lay, it did not lie in ritual, unthinking obeisance before a deity but rather, perhaps, in the slow, clumsy, errorstrewn working out of an individual or collective path. ”
- Salman Rushdie- Copy
- 2.1K
“ 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. ”
- Salman Rushdie- Copy
- 3.5K
“ All true believers have good reasons for disbelieving in every god except their own,' said Birbal, 'and so it is they who, between them, give me all the reasons for believing in none. ”
- Salman Rushdie- Copy
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“ Memory's truth, because memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else's version more than his own. ”
- Salman Rushdie- Copy
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“ Fury...sexual, Oedipal, political, magical, brutal....drives us to our finest heights and coarsest depths ”
- Salman Rushdie- Copy
- 2.7K
“ A poet's work . . . to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep. ”
- Salman Rushdie- Copy
- 1.3K
“ He knew that his father had finally run hard enough and long enough to wear down the frontiers between the worlds, he had run clear out of his skin and into the arms of his wife, to whom he had proved, once and for all, the superiority of his love. Some migrants are happy to depart. ”
- Salman Rushdie- Copy
- 1.8K
“ ...and as he aged and the world became less real he began to doubt his own beliefs, so that by the time he saw the God in whom he had never been able to believe or disbelieve he was probably expecting to do so. ”
- Salman Rushdie- Copy
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“ Go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets. Take a deep breath before you begin talking. Aim for the stars. Keep grinning. Be bloodyminded. Argue with the world. And never forget that writing is as close as we get to keeping a hold on the thousand and one thingschildhood, certainties, cities, doubts, dreams, instants, phrases, parents, lovesthat go on slipping , like sand, through our fingers. ”
- Salman Rushdie- Copy
“ Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one. ”
- Salman Rushdie- Copy
“ Obviously, a rigid, blinkered, absolutist world view is the easiest to keep hold of, whereas the fluid, uncertain, metamorphic picture I've always carried about is rather more vulnerable. Yet I must cling with all my might to … my own soul; must hold on to its mischievous, iconoclastic, outofstep clowninstincts, no matter how great the storm. And if that plunges me into contradiction and paradox, so be it; I've lived in that messy ocean all my life. I've fished in it for my art. This turbulent sea was the sea outside my bedroom window in Bombay. It is the sea by which I was born, and which I carry within me wherever I go. ”
- Salman Rushdie- Copy
“ When a book leaves its author's desk it changes. Even before anyone has read it, before eyes other than its creator's have looked upon a single phrase, it is irretrievably altered. It has become a book that can be read, that no longer belongs to its maker. It has acquired, in a sense, free will. It will make its journey through the world and there is no longer anything the author can do about it. Even he, as he looks at its sentences, reads them differently now that they can be read by others. They look like different sentences. The book has gone out into the world and the world has remade it. ”
- Salman Rushdie- Copy
“ Do not start me on The Da Vinci Code ... a novel so bad that it gives bad novels a bad name." (Discussion at Woodruff Auditorium in Lawrence, KS; October 7, 2005.) ”
- Salman Rushdie- Copy
“ From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable. ”
- Salman Rushdie- Copy
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“ 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. ”
- Salman Rushdie- Copy
- 3.2K
“ If I were asked for a onesentence sound bite on religion, I would say I was against it. ”
- Salman Rushdie- Copy
- 209
“ When...did it become irrational to dislike religion, any religion, even to dislike it vehemently? When did reason get redescribed as unreason? When were the fairy stories of the superstitious placed above criticism, beyond satire? A religion was not a race. It was an idea, and ideas stood (or fell) because they were strong enough (or too weak) to withstand criticism, not because they were shielded from it. Strong ideas welcomed dissent. ”
- Salman Rushdie- Copy
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“ He did not wish to be divine. If there had never been a God, the emperor thought, it might have been easier to work out what goodness was. This business of worship, of the abnegation of self in the face of the Almighty, was a distraction, a false trail. Wherever goodness lay, it did not lie in ritual, unthinking obeisance before a deity but rather, perhaps, in the slow, clumsy, errorstrewn working out of an individual or collective path. ”
- Salman Rushdie- Copy
- 1.4K
“ All true believers have good reasons for disbelieving in every god except their own,' said Birbal, 'and so it is they who, between them, give me all the reasons for believing in none. ”
- Salman Rushdie- Copy
- 82
“ Nobody ever wanted to go to war, but if a war came your way, it might as well be the right war, about the most important things in the world, and you might as well, if you were going to fight it, be called "Rushdie," and stand where your father had placed you, in the tradition of the grand Aristotelian, Averroës, Abul Walid Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Rushd. ”
- Salman Rushdie- Copy
- 3.3K
“ Mahound comes to me for revelation, asking me to choose between monotheist and henotheist alternatives, and I'm just some idiot actor having a bhaenchud nightmare, what the fuck do I know, yaar, what to tell you, help. Help. ”
- Salman Rushdie- Copy
- 373
“ 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. ”
- Salman Rushdie- Copy
- 1.3K
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