Rushdie Midnight Quotes & Sayings

One of the things I've thought about 'Midnight's Children' is that it is a novel which puts a Muslim family at the centre of the Indian experience. — Salman Rushdie

OK, publishing a book and releasing a movie is all very well, but Tottenham beating Man. U. 3-2 ... priceless. — Salman Rushdie

Midnight has many children; the offspring of Independence were not all human. Violence, corruption, poverty, generals, chaos, greed and pepperpot ... I had to go into exile to learn that the children of midnight were more varied that I - even I - had dreamed. — Salman Rushdie

My first novel - the novel I wrote before 'Midnight's Children' - feels, to me, now, very - I mean, I get embarrassed when I see people reading it. You know, there are some people who, bizarrely, like it. Which I'm, you know, I'm happy for. — Salman Rushdie

He wondered if he would live to see the blossom on his apple trees and felt an answering pop inside himself. Ah, so it would not be long now. It began to snow lightly, the last flakes to fall before the spring. He put on his wedding finery, the clothes he had worn so long ago when he married his beloved Pamposh, and which he had kept all this time wrapped in tissue paper in a trunk. As a bridegroom he went outdoors and the snowflakes caressed his grizzled cheeks. His mind was alert, he was ambulatory and nobody was waiting for him with a club. He had his body and his mind and it seemed he was to be spared a brutal end. That at least was kind. He went into his apple orchard, seated himself cross-legged beneath a tree, closed his eyes, heard the verses of the Rig-Veda fill the world with beauty and ceased upon the midnight with no pain. — Salman Rushdie

If she knew about the luggage, she was trouble. And Fallow had no sense of humour about his cock, to which none of the ointments had made the slightest difference. — Joe Abercrombie

This whole urban rap thing needs to be pulled back some. The ghetto is being glorified, and there's nothing good about the ghetto except getting out of one. — Franklyn Ajaye

Study, analyse the social structure - that's always far more effective than moralising. — Vincent Van Gogh

When you have city eyes you cannot see the invisible people, the men with elephantiasis of the balls and the beggars in boxcars don't impinge on you, and the concrete sections of future drainpipes don't look like dormitories. — Salman Rushdie

At last,' Padma says with satisfaction, 'you've learned how to tell things really fast. — Salman Rushdie

I was a jazz major in high school, in an all-jazz band. No matter what I do, it features my musical influences. — Wyclef Jean

I used to have this little mouse. I buy birds from the pet store and I let them go. — Ziggy Marley

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

Humans were the weakest species. Maybe that was why they could be the meanest animals. — James Patterson

Thirty-one days later, in the summer of 1981, he became a full-time writer, and the feeling of liberation as he left the agency for the last time was heady and exhilarating. He shed advertising like an unwanted skin, though he continued to take a sneaky pride in his bestknown slogan, "Naughty but nice" (created for the Fresh Cream Cake Client), and in his "bubble words" campaign for Aero chocolate (IRRESISTIBUBBLE, DELECTABUBBLE, ADORABUBBLE, the billboards cried, and bus sides read TRANSPORTABUBBLE, trade advertising said PROFITABUBBLE, and storefront decals proclaimed AVAILABUBBLE HERE). Later that year, when Midnight's Children was awarded the Booker Prize, the first telegram he received - there were these communications called "telegrams" in those days - was from his formerly puzzled boss. "Congratulations," it read. "One of us made it. — Salman Rushdie

True art, when it happens to us, challenges the 'I' that we are. A love-parallel would be just; falling in love challenges the reality to which we lay claim, part of the pleasure of love and part of its terror, is the world turned upside down. We want and we don't want, the cutting edge, the upset, the new views. Mostly we work hard at taming our emotional environment just as we work hard at taming our aesthetic environment. We already have tamed our physical environment. And are we happy with all this tameness? Are you? — Jeanette Winterson

The world's continual breathing is what we hear and call silence. — Clarice Lispector

His eyes were the same color as steel and not nearly as soft. — P.N. Elrod

Men are in numberless instances qualified for certain things, for no other reason than because they are qualified for nothing else. — William Hazlitt

Had an awesome time. You tell me to show up and all I have to do is drink beer, play guitar all day and I can lift weights and you're going to pay me for this! — Zakk Wylde

Yes, they will trample me underfoot, the numbers marching one two three, four hundred million five hundred six, reducing me to specks of voiceless dust, just as, in all good time, they will trample my son who is not my son, and his son who will not be his, and his who will not be his, until the thousand and first generation, until a thousand and one midnights have bestowed their terrible gifts and a thousand and one children have died, because it is the privilege and the curse of midnight's children to be both masters and victims of their times, to forsake privacy and be sucked into the annihilating whirlpool of the multitudes, and to be unable to live or die in peace. — Salman Rushdie

Winner of the "Booker of Bookers," Midnight's Children is the novel that can be said to have done for Indian literature what One Hundred Years of Solitude did for the literature of the Americas, exciting a boom whose echoes have yet to fade. — Salman Rushdie

Maybe reason is neater and more orderly, but nonsense is freeing. — Jessica Khoury

I was born in the city of Bombay ... once upon a time. No, that won't do, there's no getting away from the date: I was born in Doctor Narlikar's Nursing Home on August 15th, 1947. And the time? The time matters, too. Well then: at night. No, it's important to be more ... On the stroke of midnight, as a matter of fact. Clock-hands joined palms in respectful greeting as I came. Oh, spell it out, spell it out: at the precise instant of India's arrival at independence, I tumbled forth into the world. — Salman Rushdie

I don't think people cry reading 'Midnight's Children,' but a lot of people seem to cry watching the movie. — Salman Rushdie

When 'Midnight's Children' came out, people in the West tended to respond to the fantasy elements in the novel, to praise it in those terms. In India, people read it like a history book. — Salman Rushdie