Sarah L. Webb

“...in autobiography, as in all literature, what actually happened is less important than what the author can manage to persuade his audience to believe”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

“What you were is forever who you are.”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

“Yes, they will trample me underfoot, the numbers marching one two three, four hundred million five hundred six, reducing me to specks of voiceless dust, just as, in all good time, they will trample my son who is not my son, and his son who will not be his, and his who will not be his, until the thousand and first generation, until a thousand and one midnights have bestowed their terrible gifts and a thousand and one children have died, because it is the privilege and the curse of midnight’s children to be both masters and victims of their times, to forsake privacy and be sucked into the annihilating whirlpool of the multitudes, and to be unable to live or die in peace.”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

“I fell victim to the temptation of every autobiographer, to the illusion that since the past exists only in one's memories and the words which strive vainly to encapsulate them, it is possible to create past events simply by saying they occurred.”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children