Quote

A man who catches History's eye is thereafter bound to a mistress from whom he will never escape.

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
Bound
Escape
Bounds
Eye
History
Never
Thereafter
Men
Catches
Mistress

More quotes by Salman Rushdie

Image
Look at history. It's not the account of a species at peace.
Salman Rushdie
Image
I will come back to India - so deal with it.
Salman Rushdie
Image
Even the Islam stuff I thought was pretty respectful about Islam in a funny way. I mean, yes, from a secular point of view, but it talks about the birth of this religion, and I thought it was pretty admiring of the person at the center of it, the prophet of Islam.
Salman Rushdie
Image
Now I know what a ghost is. Unfinished business, that's what.
Salman Rushdie
Image
One of the things I know from the study of history is that history surprises you. History is not written. It's not inevitable.The victory of evil is not certain.
Salman Rushdie
Image
I do not read the works of Salman Rushdie, I write them. By the time I have finished writing them all I can think of is never reading them again. It's so deep, your involvement with a book, that once it's finished, then you are really done with it.
Salman Rushdie
Image
People would come and threaten them. And they would respond by putting the book in the window. Behind that, the publishers, many of whom were menaced and receiving anonymous phone calls of the very menacing kind and so, almost everybody - not everybody, but almost everybody held the line.
Salman Rushdie
Image
Children like being a little scared, but they don't want to be disturbed.
Salman Rushdie
Image
I always thought storytelling was like juggling [...] You keep a lot of different tales in the air, and juggle them up and down, and if you're good you don't drop any.
Salman Rushdie
Image
You want all your books to stick around after you've gone.
Salman Rushdie
Image
A man who invents himself needs someone to believe in him... Not only the need to be believed in, but the need to believe in another. You've got it: Love.
Salman Rushdie
Image
What had been (at the beginning) no bigger than a full stop had expanded into a comma, a word, a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter now it was bursting into more complex developments, becoming, one might say, a book - perhaps an encylopaedia - even a whole language.
Salman Rushdie
Image
For many people, I've ceased to be a human being. I've become an issue, a bother, an affair.... And has it really been so long since religions persecuted people, burning them as heretics, drowning them as witches, that you can't recognize religious persecution when you see it?
Salman Rushdie
Image
I want more than what I want. (Vina Apsara)
Salman Rushdie
Image
There is no magic on earth strong enough to wipe out the legacies of one's parents.
Salman Rushdie
Image
Originality is dangerous. It challenges, questions, overturns assumptions, unsettles moral codes.
Salman Rushdie
Image
The question I'm always asking myself is: are we masters or victims? Do we make history, or does history make us? Do we shape the world, or are we just shaped by it? The question of do we have agency in our lives or whether we are just passive victims of events is, I think, a great question, and one that I have always tried to ask.
Salman Rushdie
Image
As though she had entered a fable, as though she were no more than words crawling along a dry page, or as though she were becoming that page itself, that surface on which her story would be written and across which there blew a hot and merciless wind, turning her body to papyrus, her skin to parchment, her soul to paper.
Salman Rushdie
Image
What kind of Christmas present would Jesus ask Santa for?
Salman Rushdie
Image
Religion, a mediaeval form of unreason, when combined with modern weaponry becomes a real threat to our freedoms. This religious totalitarianism has caused a deadly mutation in the heart of Islam and we see the tragic consequences in Paris today.
Salman Rushdie