"

One minute you've got a lucky star watching over you and the next instant it's done a bunk.

"

I do have a lot of time for people in my life, and friendship is a very important subject for me. I think I'm unusual among the writers I know in that...more

"

...because it is the privilige and the curse of midnight's children to be both masters and victims of their times, to forsake privacy and be sucked in...more

"

[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 br...more

"

He had been reborn into the knowledge of death; and the inescapability of change, of things-never-the-same, of no-way-back, made him afraid. When you ...more

"

Nothing is forever, he thought beyond closed eyelids somewhere over Asia Minor. Maybe unhappiness is the continuum through which a human life moves, a...more

"

Obviously, a rigid, blinkered, absolutist world view is the easiest to keep hold of, whereas the fluid, uncertain, metamorphic picture I've always car...more

"

There are those of us who learn to live completely in the moment. For such people the Past vanishes and the future loses meaning. There is only the Pr...more

"

Meaning is a shaky edifice we build out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old fillms, small victories, people...more

"

Death and life were just adjacent verandas.

"

...one could accept Muhammad as a genuine mystic—just as one could accept Joan of Arc's voices as having genuinely been heard by her, or the revelatio...more

"

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, i...more

"

Symbolic value of the pickling process: all the six hundred million eggs which gave birth to the population of India could fit inside a single, standa...more

"

This is what loss was, what death was: an escape into the luminous wave-forms, into the ineffable speed of the light-years and the parsecs, the eterna...more

"

A race that rejected the idea of personal sacrifice would surely be erased from time's records before long.