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,...

Iff replied that the Plentimaw Fishes were what he called ‘hunger artists’ — ‘Because when they are hungry they swallow stories through every mouth, and in their innards miracles occur; a little bit of one...

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...

In this century history stopped paying attention to the old psychological orientation of reality. I mean, these days, character isn’t destiny any more. Economy is destiny. Ideology is destiny. Bombs are destiny. What does a...

Religion, a mediaeval form of unreason, when combined with modern weaponry becomes a real threat to our freedoms. This religious totalitarianism has caused a deadly mutation in the heart of Islam and we see the...

‎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.

Things aren’t like this,” he kept repeating. “It shouldn’t be this way.” As if he had access to some other plane of existence, some parallel, “right” universe, and had sensed that our time had somehow...

The self may be royal, but it hungers like a pauper. […] And it is a king imperilled, a sovereign forever at the mercy of many insurgents, of fear, for example, and anxiety, of isolation...

The fact is that in any open society people constantly say things that other people don’t like. It’s completely normal that should happen. And in any confident, free society you just shrug it off and...

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.)

I told you the truth… 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...

All liberty required was that the space for discourse itself be protected. Liberty lay in the argument itself, not the resolution of that argument, in the ability to quarrel, even with the most cherished beliefs...

The ruthlessness of the godly invalidated their claims of virtue.

When a reader falls in love with a book, it leaves its essence inside him, like radioactive fallout in an arable field, and after that there are certain crops that will no longer grow in...

The world is full of love stories, and all lovers are in a sense the avatars of their predecessors.

Enquanto a queda dos anjos era uma simples questão de poder; nem mais nem menos do que um trabalhinho de policiamento celestial, o castigo de uma rebelião, uma atitude de dureza pour décourageur les autres....

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...

…one could accept Muhammad as a genuine mystic—just as one could accept Joan of Arc’s voices as having genuinely been heard by her, or the revelations of Saint John the Divine as being that troubled...

When he was young, he told her, each phase of his life, each self he tried on, had seemed reassuringly temporary. Its imperfections didn’t matter, because he could easily replace one moment by the next,...

eduvstThe fact is that in any open society people constantly say things that other people don’t like. It’s completely normal that should happen. And in any confident, free society you just shrug it off and...

Until you know who you are you can’t write.

What kind of Christmas present would Jesus ask Santa for?