Salman Rushdie Quotes

Puns are little "plays on words" that a certain breed of person loves to spring on you and then look at you in a certain self-satisfied way to indicate that he thinks that you must think that he is by far the cleverest person on Earth now that Benjamin Franklin is dead, when in fact what you are thinking is that if this person ever ends up in a lifeboat, the other passengers will hurl him overboard by the end of the first day even if they have plenty of food and water.

And what is wrong with playing with words? Words love to be played with, just like children or kittens do!

Words played an important part in my growing up. Not only the written word... but words that flew through the air: jokes, riddles, puns.

Part of the joy and pleasure of English is its boundless creativity: I can describe a new machine as bicyclish, I can say that I'm vitamining myself to stave off a cold, I can complain that someone is the smilingest person I've ever seen, and I can decide, out of the blue, that 'fetch' is now the word I want to use to mean 'cool.'

I love to laugh, it's my main thing. I love to abuse the English language.

My family was always playing with words. It is little wonder that even after I got serious about writing, I've had a hard time getting serious about words.

Trinidadians love speaking their own English; it's full of poetic forms and can be playful and lyrical and comical. Trinidadians are verbal acrobats, and I love being on the island just to hear the people speak.

I have this little thing that people call Keegan-ese, where I don't speak English words at all. I just say stuff like, "You gotta toish the doish and you gotta maloish the hoish."

I tried to think of a witty play on Every picture tells a thousand words, but then the whole word/picture thing collapsed on me.

A really good stand-up comic is a poet; it's about the use of language. It can be really poetic. And I like politically conscious comedy.

I could dance with you till the cows come home. Better still, I'll dance with the cows and you come home." Groucho Marx was never one to pass up an opportunity for a play on words and this occurs in his dialogue of the 1933 film Duck Soup.

I love to play with language; make it do tricks, turn a word inside out to see if it's got a hidden meaning tucked away somewhere, or perhaps find that it's capable of an extra entendre or two. . . . Plotting is nothing I did, or do, naturally. It is the hardest part of the writing process. No matter how many times you plot a script successfully, the next one, representing new and uncharted territory, convinces you that you really don't know how to do it at all.

Words. Words. I play with words, hoping that some combination, even a chance combination, will say what I want.

Thus, if the clarity of our thoughts comes through better in a play of words, then the wordplay is good. One must know how to enter the ideas of others and how to leave them.

Punning is a talent which no man affects to despise but he that is without it.

In effect we are, bending and breaking the rules of the language. And if someone were to ask why we do it, the answer is simply: for fun

My father had a lot to do with me thinking about acting, though he never saw me act. He passed away probably - he passed away as I was doing my first play, but I just think being exposed to it and being around it. It wasn't something that I ever thought I couldn't do because I grew up around it.

Somebody once said that the Irish derived the greatest benefit from the English language. They court it like a beautiful woman. They make it bray with donkey laughter, they fling it at the sky like paint pots full of rainbow colors.

The pattern often has been entrenched since childhood... [abusive people] don't think that there is anything wrong with them because that is the way they were brought up in their family.

Words move, turning over like tumbling clowns; like certain books and like fleas, they possess activity. All men equally have the right to say, 'This word shall bear this meaning,' and see if they can get it across. It is a sporting game, which all can play, only all cannot win.

Puns are the highest form of literature.

Another factor is the education and culture in which you grow up. I didn't grow up in the culture of victory, where you are expected to be or have to be, the best. It was not at all like that in my family. Tennis was really a hobby. If it led to something, great. If not, there were other things in life. I think that was something I was missing at some points in my career, because when I see Hingis or the Williamses, you see how they were educated for this: to win, to be the best, a bit the American mentality. Number one. Number one. Number one. I didn't have this.

I never know who's influencing me at any time. I mean, I can take a play by Brecht and adapt it, I'm consciously adapting that play, or, as I've done with the Greek classics, Euripides and Oedipus, and I'm consciously adapting that play. Whether it influences me or not, I think it's the critics, the analysts who have to decide that. Me, I don't feel that I'm under the influence of any such sources.

If a train stops at a train station, what do you think happens at a work station?

I have always been thinking about the sounds and shades and aromas of words - fitting them together or disrupting their customary march - more or less every second of my life, waking and sleeping.