Salman Rushdie

The world, somebody wrote, is the place we prove real by dying in it.

You can't judge an internal injury by the size of the hole.

He knew what he knew: that the real world was full of magic, so magical worlds could easily be real.

Believe in your own eyes and you'll get into a lot of trouble, hot water, a mess.

In the end, you write the book that grabs you by the throat and demands to be written.

How to forgive the world for its beauty, which merely disguises its ugliness; for its gentleness, which merely cloaks its cruelty; for its illusion of continuity, seamlessly, as the night follows the day, so to speak- whereas in reality life is a series of brutal raptures, falling upon your defenseless hands, like the blows of a woodman's axe?

Sometimes by a woodland stream he watched the water rush over the pebbled bed, its tiny modulations of bounce and flow. A woman's body was like that. If you watched it carefully enough you could see how it moved to the rhythm of the world, the deep rhythm, the music below the music, the truth below the truth. He believed in this hidden truth the way other men believed in God or love, believed that truth was in fact always hidden, that the apparent, the overt, was invariably a kind of lie.

Happy endings must come at the end of something,' the Walrus pointed out. 'If they happen in the middle of a story, or an adventure, or the like, all they do is cheer things up for awhile.

Nothing comes from nothing, Thieflet; no story comes from nowhere; new stories are born from old--it is the new combinations that make them new.

Wherever goodness lay, it did not lie in ritual, unthinking obeisance before a deity but rather, perhaps, in the slow clumsy, error-strewn working out of an individual or collective path.

We crave permission openly to become our secret selves.

[...] the inevitable triumph of illusion over reality that was the single most obvious truth about the history of the human race [...]

They lived in a great city, a metropolis of many narratives that converged briefly and then separated for ever, discovering their different dooms in that crowd of stories through which all of us, following our own destinies, had to push and shove to find our way through, or out.

The only people who see the whole picture,' he murmured, 'are the ones who step out of the frame.

A photograph is a moral decision taken in one eighth of a second.

History could claw upward as well as down. The powerful could be deafened by the cries of the poor.

What's the use of stories that aren't even true?

How do you defeat terrorism? Don’t be terrorized.

Something was badly amiss with the spiritual life of the planet...Too many demons inside people claiming to believe in God.

From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable.

A little bit of one story joins onto an idea from another, and hey presto, . . . not old tales but new ones. Nothing comes from nothing.