Salman Rushdie Quotes

All my life, I have been a positive thinker... I have always been able to survive by telling myself that no matter how bad things are, they will one day be better. And that out of every event - no matter how tragic - one can always find a way to survive and even, perhaps, to be a little bit happy.

I went through an extremely trying ordeal, but I never forgot the world outside was a beautiful place.

Hope, the best comfort of our imperfect condition.

Optimism is a kind of heart stimulant - the digitalis of failure.

We always say in the Obama world, in the toughest times, you can laugh or you can cry, so you might as well laugh.

Regardless of what you're put through or what is going on in your life, keep a positive spirit. That will help you get through it.

I've never really let any kind of negative things affect me, generally. I would take a positive out of the most desperately horrible situation.

Today, I don't have any psychological scars, because I am a realist and an optimist. After all, I can't lose my legs twice.

We want to show the world that even if you go through some bad periods, you always have to think positive just to go forward.

I have always been a very positive person and tried to bring the positives from the hardest moments.

I am of the opinion, and even more so the older I get, that it is more difficult to have hope than it is to despair. And I mean this in the sense that in order to have hope you must acknowledge the despair and then you have to get beyond it. Taken from a radio interview given on BBC Radio 4's Open Book

The book is called 'A House in the Sky' because during the very, very darkest times, that was how I survived. I had to find a safe place to go in my mind where there was no violence being done to my body and where I could reflect on the life I had lived and the life that I still wanted to live.

Trouble has no necessary connection with discouragement. Discouragement has a germ of its own, as different from trouble as arthritis is different from a stiff joint.

You may not be able to change a situation, but with humor you can change your attitude about it.

I have this thing I say to myself that 'tomorrow can be better.' And I remember that period in my life where I never felt like tomorrow could be better. It was always dread for the next day.

So many people grew up with challenges, as I did. There weren't always happy things happening to me or around me. But when you look at the core of goodness within yourself - at the optimism and hope - you realize it comes from the environment you grew up in.

I know that in life there will be sickness, devastation, disappointments, heartache - it's a given. What's not a given is the way you choose to get through it all. If you look hard enough, you can always find the bright side.

We all survive more than we think we can.

That's my gift. I let that negativity roll off me like water off a duck's back. If it's not positive, I didn't hear it. If you can overcome that, fights are easy.

When times get tough, at some point, people instinctively know they need to lighten up in order to get through it.

I think you make the best with what you've got, you know? Sometimes you have very little. And you just always try to rise to higher ground, because you're going to suffer one way or the other, so you just hope that you have strength and perseverance and good friends and faith, some kind of faith, to endure and move on to greener pastures.

There's something in human nature, the trying-to-get-on-with-it quality of people, the struggle to maintain or keep the show going can be exhausting.

The secret is not to give up hope. It's very hard not to because if you're really doing something worthwhile I think you will be pushed to the brink of hopelessness before you come through the other side.

No one really has a bad life. Not even a bad day. Just bad moments.

When a lot of things are going the wrong way for a country, for a people, when you can't really think of anything worse than a war, you always try to take life on the brighter side and that's how I grew up with my parents.