{"author":"Salman Rushdie","author_id":"Salman+Rushdie","total_quotes":195,"quotes":[{"text":"In this world without quiet corners, there can be no easy escapes from history, from hullabaloo, from terrible, unquiet fuss.","author":"Salman Rushdie","tags":["world","easy","quiet "],"id":1491,"author_id":"Salman+Rushdie"},{"text":"When a reader falls in love with a book, it leaves its essence inside him, like radioactive fallout in an arable field, and after that there are certain crops that will no longer grow in him, while other, stranger, more fantastic growths may occasionally be prod.","author":"Salman Rushdie","tags":["books","ideas","impact","readers","reading"],"id":3711,"author_id":"Salman+Rushdie"},{"text":"He wished he could have roots spreading under every inch of his lost soil, his beloved lost home, that he could have been part of something, that he could have been himself, walking down the road not taken, living a life in context and not the migrant's hollow journey that had been his fate.","author":"Salman Rushdie","tags":["belonging","homesickness","identity"],"id":4055,"author_id":"Salman+Rushdie"},{"text":"How do you defeat terrorism? Don’t be terrorized.","author":"Salman Rushdie","tags":["civil-society","courage","freedom","serenity","stoicism","terrorism"],"id":5664,"author_id":"Salman+Rushdie"},{"text":"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 lose the past you're naked in front of contemptuous Azraeel, the death-angel. Hold on if you can, he told himself. Cling to yesterdays. Leave your nail-marks in the grey slope as you slide.","author":"Salman Rushdie","tags":["change","death","inevitability","rebirth","reincarnation"],"id":7987,"author_id":"Salman+Rushdie"},{"text":"There's a lot of conflict and darkness inside everybody's family. We all pretend to outsiders that it's not so, but behind locked doors, there are usually high emotions running.","author":"Salman Rushdie","tags":["conflict","darkness","emotions "],"id":12762,"author_id":"Salman+Rushdie"},{"text":"[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. Keep grinning. Be ruthless. Argue with the world. And never forget that writing is as close as we get to keeping a hold on the thousand and one things--childhood, certainties, cities, doubts, dreams, instants, phrases, parents, loves--that go on slipping like sand, through our fingers.","author":"Salman Rushdie","tags":["advice","carpe-diem","inspiration","life","writing"],"id":26636,"author_id":"Salman+Rushdie"},{"text":"It 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.","author":"Salman Rushdie","tags":["diaspora","immigrants","nostalgia"],"id":31172,"author_id":"Salman+Rushdie"},{"text":"There is no bitterness like that of man who finds out he has been believing in a ghost.","author":"Salman Rushdie","tags":["belief","bitterness","loss-of-belief"],"id":32354,"author_id":"Salman+Rushdie"},{"text":"It was important not to offend against the laws of magic. If a woman left you it was because you did not cast the right spell over her, or else because someone else cast a stronger enchantment than yours, or else because your marriage was cursed in such a way that it cut the ties of love between husband and wife. Why did So-and-so enjoy success in his businesses? Because he visited the right enchanter. There was a thing in the emperor that rebelled against all this flummery, for was it not a kind of infantilization of the self to give up one's power of agency and believe that such power resided outside oneself rather than within? This was also his objection to God, that his existence deprived human beings of the right to form ethical structures by themselves.","author":"Salman Rushdie","tags":["atheism","ethics","god","magic"],"id":32813,"author_id":"Salman+Rushdie"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":195,"pages":20,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}