The world, somebody wrote, is the place we prove real by dying in it.
SALMAN RUSHDIEAn attack upon our ability to tell stories is not just censorship – it is a crime against our nature as human beings.
More Salman Rushdie Quotes
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Something was badly amiss with the spiritual life of the planet, Too many demons inside people claiming to believe in God.
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Of course, there is nothing intrinsic linking any religion with any act of violence. The crusades don’t prove that Christianity was violent. The Inquisition doesn’t prove that Christianity tortures people. But that Christianity did torture people.
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If you actually want to change your world, there is a better way of doing it than blowing yourself up.
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I didn’t become a writer to write about me.
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What one writer can make in the solitude of one room is something no power can easily destroy.
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Faith without doubt is addiction.
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You can’t have modern states based on ideas which have been out of date for a thousand years.
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A poet’s work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.
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We were language’s magpies by nature, stealing whatever sounded bright and shiny.
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Until you know who you are you can’t write.
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Literature is the one place in any society where, within the secrecy of our own heads, we can hear voices talking about everything in every possible way.
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It is very, very easy not to be offended by a book. You just have to shut it.
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Ignorantly is how we all fall in love; for it is a kind of fall. Closing our eyes, we leap from that cliff in hope of a soft landing. Nor is it always soft; but still, without that leap nobody comes to life.
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Every time you finish a book, you have a terrible feeling that there’s just never going to be another one. But fortunately, so far, the next one has always shown up.
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I’ve been worrying about God a little bit lately. It seems like he’s been in a bad mood. And I think it has to do with the quality of lovers he’s been getting.
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In the cookie of life, friends are the chocolate chips.
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The only people who see the whole picture,’ he murmured, ‘are the ones who step out of the frame.
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For every snake, there is a ladder; for every ladder, a snake.
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Even when things are at their worst, there’s a little voice in your head saying, ‘Good story!’
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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.
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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 him, while other, stranger, more fantastic growths may occasionally be produced.
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What kind of Christmas present would Jesus ask Santa for?
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Two things form the bedrock of any open society – freedom of expression and rule of law. If you don’t have those things, you don’t have a free country.
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It seems that the right of freedom of speech that was enshrined in numerous constitutions is now under attack by religious institutions.
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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.
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Stories in families are colossally important. Every family has stories: some funny, some proud, some embarrassing, some shameful. Knowing them is proof of belonging to the family.
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