Salman Rushdie Quotes

Reality is a form of idolatry. It allows what is to define and limit what might be.

I suffer from the delusion that every product of my imagination is not only possible, but always on the cusp of becoming real.

I'm clearly not Brad Pitt, and I'm never going to be Brad Pitt.

You see people in Hollywood trying to make blockbuster after blockbuster, but it's not possible. There's some god up there saying, 'You will fail now.' But I suppose that's true of us all.

We've been programmed, from the time that we were very, very little, about what we can't do - about what is impossible.

Some goals you just never really think about trying to achieve because they just seem so out of reach.

The mistake is to imagine that perfection is possible when the very idea is unthinkable.

People mistake their limitations for high standards.

There's really no way to be perfect. Perfectionism is a silly trait to have, so in a lot of ways that inspired the world of 'Divergent,' in which everyone is striving toward that ideal and falling short of it.

When all of your wishes are granted, many of your dreams will be destroyed.

To be candid, some people have given positive thinking a bad name. I can't stand to hear some gung-ho individual say that with positive thinking you can just do 'anything.' If you think about that one for a moment, you recognize the absurdity of it.

You can't have a perfect show every time.

If the world was perfect, it wouldn't be.

You can only do so much grunting and groaning and then you're done, you know?

You can put wings on a pig, but you don't make it an eagle.

Even if an ass goes travelling he'll not come home a horse

I never really committed to being an actor. It never felt like it would be possible, I guess.

A professional knows what's impossible. If you know it's impossible, it is impossible. But if you don't know it's impossible, suddenly it is possible.

The thing with perfection is that it's never perfect.

I'll never be on the level of my idols.

Perfection is a stick with which to beat the possible.

But just then, for that fraction of time, it seems as though all things are possible. You can look across the limitations of your own life, and see that they are really nothing. In that moment when time stops, it is as though you know you could undertake any venture, complete it and come back to yourself, to find the world unchanged, and everything just as you left it a moment before. And it's as though knowing that everything is possible, suddenly nothing is necessary.

I didn't know I had a sense of limitation until I got into the greater world.

The impossible is the least that one can demand.

You can do anything when it's not real.