When he resigned his boss thought he was asking for more money. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m just going to try to be a full-time writer.’ Oh, his boss said, you want a lot more money....

Sometimes, people trying to commit suicide manage it in a manner that leaves them breathless with astonishment.

Don’t you know girls have to fool people every day of their lives if they want to get anywhere?

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...

I should never have dreamed of purpose, I am coming to the conclusion that privacy, the small individual lives of men, are preferable to all this inflated macrocosmic activity.

No, I can’t.” That was the end of their chat.

…what a leveller this remote-control gizmo was…it chopped down the heavyweight and stretched out the slight until all the set’s emissions, commercials, murders, game-shows, the thousand and one varying joys and terrors of the real...

A man who catches History’s eye is thereafter bound to a mistress from whom he will never escape.

…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, and to...

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

Names, once they are in common use, quickly become mere sounds, their etymology being buried, like so many of the earth’s marvels, beneath the dust of habit.

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.

The life of this alien city was lived under the cathedral dome of the sky. People ate where the birds could share their food and gambled where any cutpurse could steal their winnings, they kissed...

They fuck you up, your mum and dad? No, that wasn’t it at all. Well, they did do that, perhaps, but they also allowed you to become the person, and the writer, that you had...

Ravings, in short, jealousy of the past, the worst kind of all.

Akhir yang bahagia harus terjadi pada akhir sesuatu, jika terjadi di pertengahann cerita atau sebuah petualangan, atau yang semacamnya, yang terjadi hanyalah hiburan sejenak. (Anjing Laut pada Harun, hal. 207)

It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity.

Those families are exactly like my family.

Non mi piacciono i matrimoni combinati. Ci sono sbagli dei quali non bisognerebbe mai poter incolpare i propri poveri genitori.

Masks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull.

Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of...

Sometimes we feel we straddle two cultures; at other times, that we fall between two stools.

This unhoused, exiled Satan was perhaps the heavenly patron of all exiles, all unhoused people, all those who were torn from their place and left floating, half-this, half-that, denied the rooted person’s comforting, defining sense...

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 bloody-minded. Argue with the world. And never...

Women have always moaned about men…but it turns out that their deepest complaints are reserved for one another, because while they expect men to be fickle, treacherous, and weak, they judge their own sex by...

Meaning is a shaky edifice we build out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old fillms, small victories, people hated, people loved; perhaps it is because our sense of what is the...

The enemy for the fanatic is pleasure, which makes it extremely important to continue to indulge in pleasure. Dance madly. That is how you get rid of terrorism.

Only the foolish, blinded by language’s conventions, think of fire as red or gold. Fire is blue at it’s melancholy rim, green in it’s envious heart. It may burn white, or even, in it’s greatest...

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

He remembered the old Chinese proverb, sometimes ascribed to Confucius: If you sit by the river for long enough, the body of your enemy will float by.

What’s a doctor, after all? A legitimized voyeur, a stranger whom we permit to poke fingers and even hands into places where we would not permit most people to insert so much as a finger-tip,...

Things, even people have a way of leaking into each other like flavours when you cook.

At sixteen, you still think you can escape from your father. You aren’t listening to his voice speaking through your mouth, you don’t see how your gestures already mirror his; you don’t see him in...

Love, my child, is a thing that every mother learns; it is not born with a baby, but made; and for eleven years, I have learned to love you as my son.

Now I know what a ghost is. Unfinished business, that’s what.

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

If you were an atheist, Birbal,” the Emperor challenged his first minister, “what would you say to the true believers of all the great religions of the world?” Birbal was a devout Brahmin from Trivikrampur,...

Por última vez en la vida se preguntó si había malgastado su amor en una mujer que solo daba su amor hasta que llegaba el momento de retirarlo. Apartó el pensamiento de su cabeza. Había...

Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, power to retell it, to rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change, truly are powerless.

As though she had entered a fable, as though she were no more than words crawling along a dry page, or as though she were becoming that page itself, that surface on which her story...

I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything...

Do jungle animals understand the true nature of the trees among which they have their daily being? In the parent-forest, amid those mighty trunks, we shelter and play; but whether the trees are healthy or...

I allowed myself the supernatural, the transcendent, because, I told myself, our love of metaphor is pre-religious, born of our need to express what is inexpressible, our dreams of otherness, of more.

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 journey.

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.

[What Rushdie took away from reading Gunter Grass’s The Tin Drum]: Go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets. Take a deep breath before you begin talking. Aim for the...

What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.

Realism can break a writer’s heart.

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...

The moment you say that any idea system is sacred, whether it’s a religious belief system or a secular ideology, the moment you declare a set of ideas to be immune from criticism, satire, derision,...