Salman Rushdie Quotes

This is my life now. Absurd, but unpredictable. Not absurd because unpredictable but unpredictable because absurd. If I have lost the meaning of my life, I might still find small treasured things among the spilled and pilfered trash.

New York - that unnatural city where every one is an exile, none more so than the American.

I'm stuck somewhere a small island in the middle of the Atlantic where I'm alone. Because in France, they're like, 'No, you're not like us, you're not a French guy.' And in America, they're like, 'You're not like us.' I'm really alone in my little thing.

With so much to be aware of, awareness bracelets have reverted to signifying nothing more than color itself. Idealism has devolved into fashion.

Nothing is capable of being well set to music that is not nonsense.

Ecstatic absurdity: it's the confrontation with meaninglessness.

It is not in the world of ideas that life is lived. Life is lived for better or worse in life, and to a man in life, his life can be no more absurd than it can be the opposite of absurd, whatever that opposite may be.

When people conclude that all is futile, then the absurd becomes the norm.

The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.

I'm afraid that if you look at a thing long enough, it loses all of its meaning.

I always feel like a foreigner in America.

Cut off from his religious, metaphysical and transcendental roots, man is lost; all his actions become senseless, absurd, useless.

I never felt truly at home in Switzerland.

Although I hold a German passport, I feel very much alienated when I'm there.

The meaningless absurdity of life is the only incontestable knowledge accessible to man.

I stick my finger into existence and it smells of nothing.

A man who has become conscious of the absurd is for ever bound to it.

The purpose of existence is to exist. It is too fantastic to have a meaning.

L'absurde est la notion essentielle et la premie' re ve? rite? . The absurd is the fundamental idea and the first truth.

why shouldnt things be largely absurd, futile, and transitory? they are so, and we are so, and they and we go together.

Everything is absurd.

Man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.

The absolute has moved into the fortress of the absurd.

What would I do without the absurd and the ephemeral?

I am not a logician. I am an existentialist. I believe in this meaningless, beautiful chaos of existence, and I am ready to go with it wherever it leads.