"The metaphor is probably the most fertile power possessed by man"
— Jose Ortega y Gasset

"The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand"
— Italo Calvino

"A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle. "
— Irina Dunn

"And, in the end
The love you take
is equal to the love you make."
— Paul McCartney

"From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable."
— Salman Rushdie (The Satanic Verses)

"Absence is to love as wind is to fire: it extinguishes the little flame, it fans the big."
— Umberto Eco

"
Baal says: “Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can’t forgive,”

and Mahound replies: “Writers and whores. I see no difference here.”
"
— Salman Rushdie

"When you really want something to happen, the whole universe conspires so that your wish comes true."
— Paulo Coelho

"Fundamentalism isn't about religion, it's about power."
— Salman Rushdie

"faith without doubt is addiction"
— Salman Rushdie

"Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can't forgive."
— Salman Rushdie (Midnight's Children)

"Memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else's version more than his own."
— Salman Rushdie (Midnight's Children)

"A book is not completed till it's read."
— Salman Rushdie

"A photograph is a moral decision taken in one eighth of a second. "
— Salman Rushdie (The Ground Beneath Her Feet)

"Nothing comes from nothing, Thieflet; no story comes from nowhere; new stories are born from old--it is the new combinations that make them new."
— Salman Rushdie (Haroun and the Sea of Stories)

"You can't judge an internal injury by the size of the hole."
— Salman Rushdie (The Satanic Verses)

"If love is a yearning to be like (even to become) the beloved, then hatred, it must be said, can be engendered by the same ambition, when it cannot be fulfilled."
— Salman Rushdie (The Satanic Verses)

"'A poet's work...To name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep.'"
— Salman Rushdie (The Satanic Verses)

"Is birth always a fall?"
— Salman Rushdie (The Satanic Verses)

"I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth. "
— Umberto Eco

"What is life if not the shadow of a fleeting dream?"
— Umberto Eco (Baudolino)

"We were clever enough to turn a laundry list into poetry."
— Umberto Eco (Foucault's Pendulum)

"Memory is a stopgap for humans, for whom time flies and what is passed is passed."
— Umberto Eco (The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana)