Quote

To understand just one life you have to swallow the world ... do you wonder, then, that I was a heavy child?

Salman Rushdie

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Salman Rushdie
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: June 19
Actor
Essayist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Bombay
Rushdie
Joseph Anton
Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie
Heavy
Wonder
Child
Understand
Children
Life
World
Swallow

More quotes by Salman Rushdie

Image
Things, even people have a way of leaking into each other like flavours when you cook.
Salman Rushdie
Image
At the height of the British Empire very few English novels were written that dealt with British power. It's extraordinary that at the moment in which England was the global superpower the subject of British power appeared not to interest most writers.
Salman Rushdie
Image
It just requires so much of you, and most of the time you feel dumb.
Salman Rushdie
Image
I seem to have fallen for women with missing parents. Goodness knows what it signifies.
Salman Rushdie
Image
thought I was doing two things. One is inquiring into the phenomenon of revelation, if you are not a religious person. But, clearly, it's a sincere phenomenon.
Salman Rushdie
Image
A figure of speech is a shifty thing it can be twisted or it can be straight.
Salman Rushdie
Image
We must conclude that it is not only a particular political ideology that has failed, but the idea that men and women could ever define themselves in terms that exclude their spiritual needs.
Salman Rushdie
Image
The history of a culture can be determined by its untranslatable words.
Salman Rushdie
Image
Free societies...are societies in motion, and with motion comes tension, dissent, friction. Free people strike sparks, and those sparks are the best evidence of freedom's existence.
Salman Rushdie
Image
I was 21 in 1968, so I'm as much a child of the '60s as is possible to be. In those years the subject of religion had really almost disappeared the idea that religion was going to be a major force in the life of our societies, in the West anyway, would have seemed absurd in 1968.
Salman Rushdie
Image
I had a very difficult relationship with my father, which ended up okay, but there were many difficult years.
Salman Rushdie
Image
Human beings understand themselves and shape their futures by arguing and challenging and questioning and saying the un-sayable, not by bowing the knee whether to gods or to men.
Salman Rushdie
Image
I do think there was a period there when my sanity was under intense pressure, and I didn't know what to say or do or how to act. I was literally living from day to day.
Salman Rushdie
Image
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, naked and alone between the captive armies of the earth?
Salman Rushdie
Image
Everything has shape, if you look for it. There is no escape from form.
Salman Rushdie
Image
Can one drown in one's element... If fish can drown in water, can human beings suffocate in air?
Salman Rushdie
Image
If love is a yearning to be like (even to become) the beloved, then hatred, it must be said, can be engendered by the same ambition, when it cannot be fulfilled.
Salman Rushdie
Image
I don't think I've ever quite grown out of it, actually. There was a point where I could recite some of those Elvish verses - which I've mercifully forgotten. But I can still, if really pushed, recite the text of the inside of the ruling ring in the language of Mordor.
Salman Rushdie
Image
If you have children you worry about the world you're leaving them.
Salman Rushdie
Image
I believe in the art of literature, I believe in freedom of the imagination, I believe in the kind of liberties that we enjoy in these lucky countries of the world.
Salman Rushdie