If you actually want to change your world, there is a better way of doing it than blowing yourself up. Salman Rushdie More Quotes by Salman Rushdie More Quotes From Salman Rushdie Originality is dangerous. It challenges, questions, overturns assumptions, unsettles moral codes. Salman Rushdie originality moral challenges Something was badly amiss with the spiritual life of the planet...Too many demons inside people claiming to believe in God. Salman Rushdie spiritual believe people Whenever someone who knows you disappears, you lose one version of yourself. Yourself as you were seen, as you were judged to be. Lover or enemy, mother or friend, those who know us construct us, and their several knowings slant the different facets of our characters like diamond-cutter's tools. Each such loss is a step leading to the grave, where all versions blend and end. Salman Rushdie friends mother character A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return. Salman Rushdie reading writing book When you write, you write out of your best self. Everything else drops away. Salman Rushdie best-self self writing Our lives disconnect and reconnect, we move on, and later we may again touch one another, again bounce away. This is the felt shape of a human life, neither simply linear nor wholly disjunctive nor endlessly bifurcating, but rather this bouncey-castle sequence of bumpings-into and tumblings-apart. Salman Rushdie tumbling castles moving This may be the curse of human race . Not that we are different from one anther , but we are so alike . Salman Rushdie different race may What can't be cured must be endured. Salman Rushdie medical medicine All art began as sacred art, you know? I mean, all painting began as religious painting. All writing began as religious writing. Salman Rushdie religious writing art Exile is a dream of a glorious return. Exile is a vision of revolution: Elba, not St Helena. It is an endless paradox: looking forward by always looking back. The exile is a ball hurled high into the air. Salman Rushdie vision air dream Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one. Salman Rushdie creation writing book Music, love, death. Certainly a triangle of sorts; maybe even an eternal one. "The only people who can see the whole picture," he murmured, "are the ones who step out of the frame." Salman Rushdie triangles feet people The publishing of a book is a worldwide event. The attempt to suppress a book is a worldwide event. Salman Rushdie publishing events book 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, it inevitably seems more and more incredible. Salman Rushdie time reality past Now I know what a ghost is. Unfinished business, that's what. Salman Rushdie unfinished unfinished-business ghost My heart broke open and history fell in. Salman Rushdie broke my-heart heart 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 becoming-one development book Such is the miraculous nature of the future of exiles: what is first uttered in the impotence of an overheated apartment becomes the fate of nations. Salman Rushdie fate nature firsts When you throw everything up in the air anything becomes possible. Salman Rushdie up-in-the-air air Without water we are nothing", the traveler thought. "Even an emperor, denied water, would swiftly turn to dust. Water is the real monarch and we are all its slaves. Salman Rushdie dust real water