Quotes by Salman Rushdie

“...because it is the privilige and the curse of midnight's children to be both masters and victims of their times, to forsake privacy and be sucked into the annihilating whirlpool of the multitudes...”

“If we can cease envisaging ourselves as metaphorical foetuses, and substitute the image of a newborn child, then that will be at least a small intellectual advance. In time, perhaps, we may even le...”

“For a long while I have believed this is perhaps my version of Sir Darius Xerxes Camas belief in a fourth function of outsideness that in every generation there are a few souls, call them lucky o...”

“It has been observed that all Americans need a frontier: pain was hers, and she was determined to push it out.”

“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.”

“During, he looked away from all the strain, all the scratchiness, all the fights that never got going, he closed his eyes and waited until her smile came back. He allowed himself to believe in that...”

“I dislike arranged marriages. There are some mistakes for which one should not be able to blame one's poor parents.”

“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...”

“Masks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull.”

“Fury...sexual, Oedipal, political, magical, brutal....drives us to our finest heights and coarsest depths”

“From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable.”

“So Indias problem turns out to be the worlds problem. What happened in India has happened in Gods name.The problems name is God.”

“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.”

“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 pro...”

“Most of the oppression of Muslims in the world right now is carried out by other Muslims.”

“Among the great struggles of man-good/evil, reason/unreason, etc.-there is also this mighty conflict between the fantasy of Home and the fantasy of Away, the dream of roots and the mirage of the jo...”

“And eventually in that house where everyone, even the fugitive hiding in the cellar from his faceless enemies, finds his tongue cleaving dryly to the roof of his mouth, where even the sons of the h...”

“Free societies...are societies in motion, and with motion comes tension, dissent, friction. Free people strike sparks, and those sparks are the best evidence of freedom's existence.”

“How do you defeat terrorism? Dont be terrorized.”

“The fundamentalist seeks to bring down a great deal more than buildings. Such people are against, to offer just a brief list, freedom of speech, a multi-party political system, universal adult suff...”