Salman Rushdie Quotes

It's very rare that people are exactly who they appear to be.

A mask tells us more than a face.

The plays I choose to work on are about having masks. We all have masks in life, but there is a different inner life going on. The audience has to work hard to see what is going on. I love what is not on display.

It's very rare that people are exactly who they appear to be. Venice has a lot of that too, but the face of it is quite beautiful, interesting, and textured.

The trouble with a mask is it never changes

All words are masks and the lovelier they are, the more they are meant to conceal.

Masks are what they seem to be; not so the faces beneath them.

Camouflage is a game we all like to play, but our secrets are as surely revealed by what we want to seem to be as by what we want to conceal.

God hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another.

Very few of us are what we seem.

Society is a masked ball, where every one hides his real character, and reveals it by hiding.

Our civilized world is nothing but a great masquerade. You encounter knights, parsons, soldiers, doctors, lawyers, priests, philosophers and a thousand more: but they are not what they appear - they are merely masks... Usually, as I say, there is nothing but industrialists, businessmen and speculators concealed behind all these masks.

No one can wear a mask for very long.

I am not what you see and hear.

All of us show many faces to the world. No one shows her true face all of the time. To do that would be dangerous, for what is seen can also be known.

Beauty is almost no longer possible if it is not a lie.

It’s amazing what lies people can sustain behind the mask of their real faces.

'Tis not need we know our every thought Or see the work shop where each mask is wrought Wherefrom we view the world of box and pit, Careless of wear, just so the mask shall fit And serve our jape's turn for a night or two.

When he admitted this to me, I found myself almost annoyed. It was as if he'd hidden this part of himself in order to deceive me, pretending-- as do many people I've discovered--to be what he is not. No one I've ever known is what he appears to be on the surface.

No one knows who the real me is, so I can be a hundred different kinds of me.

I am fascinated by that notion of people are never as they seem. And that doesn't make them good or bad. It's just we don't ever really show ourselves if we don't have to.

One goes on with the blithe belief that who you really are is transparent to everybody. Then you realise, with some horror, that in fact it's not. So all you can do is keep muddying the waters a bit.

Being is like pretending.

Strip away the phony tinsel of Hollywood and you'll find the real tinsel underneath.

I'm nothing more than what you actually see, but I am also the complete opposite.