Salman Rushdie

After a long, hopeless war, people will settle for peace, at almost any price.

Live on, survive, for the earth gives forth wonders. It may swallow your heart, but the wonders keep on coming. You stand before them bareheaded, shriven. What is expected of you is attention.

There needs to be a thorough examination, by Muslims everywhere, of why it is that the faith they love breeds so many violent mutant strains.

The liveliness of literature lies in its exceptionality, in being the individual, idiosyncratic vision of one human being, in which, to our delight and great surprise, we may find our own vision reflected.

I learned: the first lesson of my life: nobody can face the world with his eyes open all the time.

Life is lived forward but is judged in reverse.

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

You never know the answers to the questions of life until you are asked.

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.

This may be the curse of human race . Not that we are different from one anther , but we are so alike .

She saw him fracture into rainbow colors through the prism of her love.

‎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.

Our lives, our stories, flowed into one another's, were no longer our own, individual, discrete.

My heart broke open and history fell in.

A figure of speech is a shifty thing; it can be twisted or it can be straight.

He had picked up languages the way most sailors pick up diseases; languages were his gonorrhoea, his syphilis, his scurvy, his ague, his plague.

India, the new myth--a collective fiction in which anything was possible, a fable rivalled only by the two other mighty fantasies: money and God.

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

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

O the shame of it, the humiliating shame of being condescended to by dolts

Realism can break a writer's heart.