01c. 1947 ADIff replied that the Plentimaw Fishes were what he called 'hunger artists' — 'Because when they are hungry they swallow stories through every mouth, and in their innards miracles occur; a little bit of one story joins on to an idea from another, and hey presto, when they spew the stories out they are not the old tales but new ones. 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 / quote ↗
02c. 1947 ADMany of us persons of the tinted persuasion care about human rights and artistic freedom too.Salman Rushdie / quote ↗
03c. 1947 ADShe has vivid pictures of Hell. It is as hot as Rajputana in June and everyone is made to learn seven foreign languages . . .Salman Rushdie / quote ↗
05c. 1947 ADA question I have often asked is, ‘What would an inoffensive political cartoon look like?’ What would a respectful cartoon look like? The form requires disrespect and so if we are going to have in the world things like cartoons and satire, we just have to accept it as part of the price of freSalman Rushdie / quote ↗
06c. 1947 ADOnce upon a time there was a mother who, in order to become a mother, had agreed to change her name; who set herself the task of falling in love with her husband bit-by-bit, but who could n ever manage to love one part, the part, curiously enough, which made possible her motherhood; whose feet were hobbled by verrucas and whose shoulders were stooped beneath the accumulating guilts of the world; whose husband's unlovable organ failed to recover from the effects of a freeze; and who, like her husband, finally succumbed to the mysteries of telephones, spending long minutes listening to the words of wrong-number callers . . . shortly after my tenth birthday (when I had recovered from the fever which has recently returned to plague me after an interval of nearly twenty-one years), Amina Sinai resumed her recent practice of leaving suddenly, and always immediately after a wrong number, on urgent shopping trips.Salman Rushdie / quote ↗
07c. 1947 ADDon't you know girls have to fool people every day of their lives if they want to get anywhere?Salman Rushdie / quote ↗
08c. 1947 ADThe enemy for the fanatic is pleasure, which makes it extremely important to continue to indulge in pleasure. Dance madly. That is how you get rid of terrorism.Salman Rushdie / quote ↗
09c. 1947 ADIt may be that writers in my position,exiles, or emigrants or expatriates, are haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back, even at the risk of being mutilated into pillars of salt. But if we do look back, we must do in the knowledge - which gives rise to profound uncertainties- that our physical alienation from India almost inevitably means that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost, that we will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind.Salman Rushdie / quote ↗
10c. 1947 ADThe ruthlessness of the godly invalidated their claims of virtue.Salman Rushdie / quote ↗
12c. 1947 AD...what a leveller this remote-control gizmo was...it chopped down the heavyweight and stretched out the slight until all the set's emissions, commercials, murders, game-shows, the thousand and one varying joys and terrors of the real and the imagined, acquired an equal weight...Salman Rushdie / quote ↗
15c. 1947 ADA photograph is a moral decision taken in one eighth of a second.Salman Rushdie / quote ↗
18c. 1947 ADI 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.Salman Rushdie / quote ↗
19c. 1947 ADI should never have dreamed of purpose, I am coming to the conclusion that privacy, the small individual lives of men, are preferable to all this inflated macrocosmic activity.Salman Rushdie / quote ↗
20c. 1947 ADThat was how we spoke, my mother and I: in puns and games and rhymes. In, you might say, lyrics. This was our tragedy. We were language's magpies by nature, stealing whatever sounded bright and shiny. We were tinpan alleycats, but the gift of music had been withheld. We could not sing along, though we always knew the words. Still, defiantly, we roared our tuneless roars, we fell off the high notes and were trampled by the low ones. And if bitter ices were the consequence, well, there were worse fates in the world than that.Salman Rushdie / quote ↗
21c. 1947 ADSymbolic value of the pickling process: all the six hundred million eggs which gave birth to the population of India could fit inside a single, standard-sized pickle-jar; six hundred million spermatozoa could be lifted on a single spoon. Every pickle-jar (you will forgive me if I become florid for a moment) contains, therefore, the most exalted of possibilities: the feasibility of the chutnification of history; the grand hope of the pickling of time!Salman Rushdie / quote ↗
22c. 1947 ADBut then the subject turned to the spiritual life and Meg talked about her many visits to ashrams in India and her admiration for Swami Muktananda and Gurumayi. That got in the way, especially because he told her of his skepticism regarding the guru industry, and suggested she might profitably read Gita Mehta’s book Karma Cola. “Why are you so cynical?” she asked him, as if she genuinely wanted to know the answer, and he said that if you grew up in India it was easy to conclude that these people were fakes. “Yes, of course there are lots of charlatans,” she said, reasonably, “but can’t you discriminate?” He shook his head sadly. “No,” he said. “No, I can’t.” That was the end of their chat.Salman Rushdie / quote ↗
23c. 1947 ADRunning 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 booth, out of which a perplexed-looking man holding a screwdriver would periodically emerge. A group of dwarf bandits could be seen disappearing into a hole in the sky. "Time travelers," said Nobodaddy in a voice of gentle disgust. "They're everywhere these days.Salman Rushdie / quote ↗
24c. 1947 ADStudy history, Alleluia. In this century history stopped paying attention to the old psychological orientation of reality. I mean, these days, character isn't destiny any more. Economics is destiny. Ideology is destiny. Bombs are destiny. What does a famine, a gas chamber, a grenade care how you lived your life? Crisis comes, death comes, and your pathetic individual self doesn't have a thing to do with it, only to suffer the effects. This Gibreel of yours: maybe he's how history happens to you.Salman Rushdie / quote ↗
