Salman Rushdie Quotes

Sanity - a trick of agreement

Sanity is only that which is within the frame of reference of conventional thought.

Sanity is not truth. Sanity is conformity to what is socially expected. Truth is sometimes in conformity, sometimes not.

Now that's a concept that's always fascinated me: the real world. Only a very specific subset of people use the term, have you noticed? To me, it seems self-evident that everyone lives in the real world - we all breathe real oxygen, eat real food, the earth under our feet feels equally solid to all of us. But clearly these people have a far more tightly circumscribed definition of reality, one that I find deeply mysterious, and an almost pathologically intense need to bring others into line with that definition.

A sane person to an insane society must appear insane.

Is it you and I who are crazy, or is it everybody else?

When the world goes mad, one must accept madness as sanity; since sanity is, in the last analysis, nothing but the madness on which the whole world happens to agree.

The relationship between the imagined and the real is more complicated than people imagine.

I think everybody's crazy, and if I'm the one being a little direct about it, that's fine by me.

A question that sometimes drives me hazy: am I or are the others crazy?

Well, sanity, I suppose, is getting people to see the world your way.

If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.

It is not important whether or not the interpretation is correct-- if men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.

I haven't got a problem with sheeple calling me crazy. What's sane? What is crazy?

The world consists of images on a screen, and consciousness is the steady light that emanates from the projector.

Oh yes! The one man in the world who never believes he's mad is the madman.

I realized either I was crazy or the world was crazy; and I picked on the world. And of course I was right.

Ego is a structure that is erected by a neurotic individual who is a member of a neurotic culture against the facts of the matter. And culture, which we put on like an overcoat, is the collectivized consensus about what sort of neurotic behaviors are acceptable.

You say they create their own reality," said Veronika, "but what is reality?

Insanity is just a state of mind.

The problem with being nuts, she thought, is that you don't always feel as if you're nuts. Sometimes, in fact, you feel perfectly sane, and there just happens to be a trailer-shaped dragon crouching in the lot next door.

Conformity to a sick society is to be sick.

We have all got to exert ourselves a little to keep sane, and call things by the same names as other people call them by.

Imagine, [Kriezler] said, that you enter a large, somewhat crumbling hall that echoes with the sounds of people mumbling and talking repetitively to themselves. All around you these people fall into prostrate positions, some of them weeping. Where are you? Sara’s answer was immediate: in an asylum. Perhaps, Kreizler answered, but you could also be in a church. In the one place the behavior would be considered mad; in the other, not only sane, but as respectable as any human activity can be.

For the more a soul conforms to the sanity of others, the more does it become insane.