“Civilsation is the sleight of hand that conceals our natures from ourselves.” — Salman Rushdie Copy Share Image
We were language's magpies by nature, stealing whatever sounded bright and shiny. — Salman Rushdie Copy Share Image
There is no magic on earth strong enough to wipe out the legacies of one's parents. — Salman Rushdie Copy Share Image
“we can best understand the nature of this culture if we say that it found its truest mirror in a corpse” — Salman Rushdie Copy Share Image
Original thought, original artistic expression is by its very nature questioning, irreverent, iconoclastic. — Salman Rushdie Copy Share Image
An attack upon our ability to tell stories is not just censorship - it is a crime against our nature as human… — Salman Rushdie Copy Share Image
“We strive for heights bit our natures betray us, Chamcha thought; clowns in search of crowns. The bitterness overcame him” — Salman Rushdie Copy Share Image
Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same… — Salman Rushdie Copy Share Image
Such is the miraculous nature of the future of exiles: what is first uttered in the impotence of an overheated apartment becomes… — Salman Rushdie Copy Share Image
I do think that there is such a thing as human nature, and that the things that we have in common are… — Salman Rushdie Copy Share Image
Names, once they are in common use, quickly become mere sounds, their etymology being buried, like so many of the earth's marvels,… — Salman Rushdie Copy Share Image
“The problem is not technological,” he said. “And there is no technological solution to it. The problem is human, human nature in… — Salman Rushdie Copy Share Image
“But one thinks, also, of the parable of the scorpion and the frog. The scorpion acts according to its nature even when… — Salman Rushdie Copy Share Image
Once you have been in an earthquake you know, even if you survive without a scratch, that like a stroke in the… — Salman Rushdie Copy Share Image
“union of opposites to form human nature was just what human beings told themselves to rationalize away their imperfections. Maybe it was… — Salman Rushdie Copy Share Image
“I repeat: there is no place for monsters in civilized society. If such creatures roam the earth, they do so out on… — Salman Rushdie Copy Share Image
“London had grown unstable once again, revealing its true, capricious, tormented nature, its anguish of a city that had lost its sense… — Salman Rushdie Copy Share Image
“Exile is a dream of glorious return. Exile is a vision of revolution: Elba, not St Helena. It is an endless paradox:… — Salman Rushdie Copy Share Image
“I am by nature an inward man, he said silently into the disconnected phone. I have struggled, in my fashion, to find… — Salman Rushdie Copy Share Image
“History is natural selection. Mutant versions of the past struggle for dominance; new species of fact arise,and old, saurian truths go to… — Salman Rushdie Copy Share Image
“Live on, survive, for the earth gives forth wonders. It may swallow your heart, but the wonders keep on coming. You stand… — Salman Rushdie Copy Share Image
When we stop believing in gods we can start believing in their stories, I retort. There are of course no such things… — Salman Rushdie Copy Share Image
“That was how we spoke, my mother and I: in puns and games and rhymes. In, you might say, lyrics. This was… — Salman Rushdie Copy Share Image
“London, its conglomerate nature mirroring his own, its reticence also his; its gargoyles, the ghostly footfalls in its streets of Roman feet,… — Salman Rushdie Copy Share Image
“Tragedy happens - "tragic mistakes" happen - when men act according to their flawed natures, in fulfillment of their preordained destinies. The… — Salman Rushdie Copy Share Image
If my child had prejudice in his head, I'd be ashamed. I would see it as my failure as a parent. — Salman Rushdie Copy Share Image
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… — Salman Rushdie Copy Share Image
I want to write novels. I want to write stories. I want to do the stuff that I became a writer to do. — Salman Rushdie Copy Share Image
If you want to be a serious writer, then you have to write what there is to write about. If you're going to pull… — Salman Rushdie Copy Share Image
“Después de exigir mi marcha, ya no posees jurisdicción en lo concerniente a mi salud.” — Salman Rushdie Copy Share Image
If there is a choice between absolute safety and freedom, then freedom must always prevail. — Salman Rushdie Copy Share Image
I'm not a prophet, but I always thought it was natural for dictatorships to fall. I remember in 1989, two months before the fall… — Salman Rushdie Copy Share Image
I'd wanted to create a storm so that I could become more famous and richer. — Salman Rushdie Copy Share Image
Who what am I? My answer: I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done,… — Salman Rushdie Copy Share Image
“information, in a stream-of-consciousness soliloquy that revealed the extent to which he had internalised the adversarial fragmentation of American culture and made it a… — Salman Rushdie Copy Share Image
