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.

After that, for several months, mother and ayah took it in turns to open and close my lids. 'He'll learn, Madam,' Mary comforted Amina, 'He is a good obedient child and he will get the hang of it for sure.' I learned: the first lesson of my life: nobody can face the world with his eyes open all the time.

The Brass Monkey was never so furious as when anyone spoke to her in words of love

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