Salman Rushdie

… And Musa, my father's old servant, who had accompanied the couple to Bombay, went off to tell the other servants, in the kitchens of the red-tiled palaces, in the servants' quarters at the backs of Versailles and Escorial and Sans Souci: 'It's going to be a real ten-rupee baby; yes, sir! A whopper of a ten-chip pomfret, wait and see!' The servants were pleased; because a birth is a fine thing and a good big baby is best of all…

To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world.

But of course,” Bruce murmured, “he’s absolutely telling the truth.”

The mind of one murderer valued trucks more highly than human beings

to execute a writer for his blasphemous words, and faith, or a particular interpretation of faith, was the truck they loved more than human life

To grow up steeped in these tellings was to learn two unforgettable lessons: first, that stories were not true (there were no “real” genies in bottles or flying carpets or wonderful lamps), but by being untrue they could make him feel and know truths that the truth could not tell him, and second, that they all belonged to him, just as they belonged to his father

Man was the storytelling animal, the only creature on earth that told itself stories to understand what kind of creature it was

the gigantic branching interwoven forests of whispering family trees she bore within her, hung with the juicy forbidden fruit of scandal

you did not want a secret to get out there was only one rule: Tell it to nobody

because of his admiration for Ibn Rushd, “Averroës” to the West, the twelfth-century Spanish-Arab philosopher of

he respected Ibn Rushd for being at the forefront of the rationalist argument against Islamic literalism in his time