Running along the bank was a white rabbit wearing a waistcoat and looking worriedly at a clock. Appearing and disappearing at various points on both banks was a dark blue British police telephone boot...
Roots, I sometimes think, are a conservative myth, designed to keep us in our places.
Rage made you the creature of those who enraged you, it gave them to much power. Rage killed the mind...
Question: What is the opposite of faith? Not disbelief. Too final, certain, closed. Itself is a kind of belief. Doubt.
Our lives, our stories, flowed into one another's, were no longer our own, individual, discrete.
Life is fury, he'd thought. Fury — sexual, Oedipal, political, magical, brutal — drives us to our finest heights and coarsest depths. Out of furia comes creation, inspiration, originality, passion, bu...
Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true.
It is all for love. Which is a wonderful and dashing matter. But which can also be a very foolish thing.
If a birth is the fall-out from the explosion caused by the union of two unstable elements, then perhaps a half-life is all we can expect.
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.
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.
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 a while.'That'll do...
Can one drown in one's element... If fish can drown in water, can human beings suffocate in air?
But love is what we want, not freedom. Who then is the unluckier man? The beloved, who is given his heart's desire and must for ever after fear its loss, or the free man, with his unlooked-for liberty...
And so I returned to that city in which, in those last hours before reunions, Shaheed and I saw many things which were not true, which were not possible, because our boys would not could not have beha...
For those who value stability, who fear transience, uncertainty, change, have erected a powerful system of stigmas and taboos against rootlessness, that disruptive, anti-social force, so that we mostl...
[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 stars....
History is unkind to those it abandons, and can be equally unkind to those who make it.
Fury...sexual, Oedipal, political, magical, brutal....drives us to our finest heights and coarsest depths
If you take a look at history, you will find that the understanding of what is good and evil has always existed before the individual religions. The religions were only invented by people afterwards,...