Salman Rushdie quotes - page 2

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. (Salman Rushdie)
I admit it: above all things, I fear absurdity. View quote
Salman Rushdie
What you were is forever who you are. View quote
Salman Rushdie
Everything has shape, if you look for it. There is no escape from form. View quote
Salman Rushdie
There is nothing like a War for the reinvention of lives... View quote
Salman Rushdie
What's the use of stories that aren't even true? View quote
Salman Rushdie
God, Satan, Paradise, and Hell all vanished one day in my fifteenth year, when I quite abruptly lost my faith. ... and afterwards, to prove my new-found atheism, I bought myself a rather tasteless ham sandwich, and so partook for the first time of the forbidden flesh of the swine. No thunderbolt arrived to strike me down. ... From that day to this I have thought of myself as a wholly secular person. View quote
Salman Rushdie
Rock and roll music - the music of freedom frightens people and unleashes all manner of conservative defense mechanisms. View quote
Salman Rushdie
I do not need the idea of God to explain the world I live in. View quote
Salman Rushdie
Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory. View quote
Salman Rushdie
What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry. (Salman Rushdie)
Friendships are the family we make - not the one we inherit. I've always been someone to whom friendship, elective affinities, is as important as family. View quote
Salman Rushdie
Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts. View quote
Salman Rushdie
It is very, very easy not to be offended by a book. You just have to shut it. View quote
Salman Rushdie
If Woody Allen were a Muslim, he'd be dead by now. View quote
Salman Rushdie
What's real and what's true aren't necessarily the same. View quote
Salman Rushdie
I fell victim to the temptation of every autobiographer, to the illusion that since the past exists only in one's memories and the words which strive vainly to encapsulate them, it is possible to create past events simply by saying they occurred. View quote
Salman Rushdie
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 incredible. View quote
Salman Rushdie
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. View quote
Salman Rushdie
He knew what he knew: that the real world was full of magic, so magical worls could easily be real. View quote
Salman Rushdie
Obviously, a rigid, blinkered, absolutist world view is the easiest to keep hold of, whereas the fluid, uncertain, metamorphic picture I've always carried about is rather more vulnerable. (Salman Rushdie)
Now I know what a ghost is. Unfinished business, that's what. View quote
Salman Rushdie
Free societies... are societies in motion, and with motion comes tension, dissent, friction. Free people strike sparks, and those sparks are the best evidence of freedom's existence. View quote
Salman Rushdie
A book is not completed till it's read. View quote
Salman Rushdie
Realism can break a writer's heart. View quote
Salman Rushdie