Salman Rushdie
Salman Rushdie
Sir Ahmad Salman Rushdie, FRSL, احمد سلمان رشدی; born 19 June 1947) is a British Indian novelist and essayist. His second novel, Midnight's Children, won the Booker Prize in 1981. Much of his fiction is set on the Indian subcontinent. He combines magical realism with historical fiction; his work is concerned with the many connections, disruptions, and migrations between Eastern and Western civilizations...
NationalityIndian
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth19 June 1947
CityMumbai, India
CountryIndia
I used to say: ''there is a God-shaped hole in me.'' For a long time I stressed the absence, the hole. Now I find it is the shape which has become more important.
Always do something impossible right at the beginning of the show?. Swallow a sword, tie yourself in a knot, defy gravity. Do what the audience knows it could never do no matter how hard it tries. After that you'll have them eating out of your hand.
There'll be one track that I like and a lot of it that is just wallpaper and sounds the same.
A purpose of our lives is to broaden what we can understand and say and therefore be.
A poet's work is to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.
In today's U.S., it's possible for almost anyone - women, gays, African-Americans, Jews - to run for, and be elected to, high office.
I never thought of myself as a writer about religion until a religion came after me.
I am not in the business of suppressing books.
I don't like books that seem to want to teach me things. Which is not to say that one doesn't learn from books - but you do your own learning in your own way.
It was because it was easier to blame me, ... You know, 'Why is he rocking the boat?' In those days there was a lot of that stuff. He was asking for it. He did it on purpose. He was begging for it. It was just conventional blaming-the-victim stuff. I don't like the term 'victim' when applied to myself. Certainly I felt the guilt burden had shifted from the people doing the violence to the person on the receiving end of the violence.
In the experience of art, time seems not to exist.
When people do the cowardly thing, it's not about respect, it's about fear.
Memory is a way of telling you what's important to you.
What I worry about and don't like is the way in which the ideology of multiculturalism has declined into cultural relativism. I think that's very dangerous. When the Archbishop of Canterbury, for God's sake, says that you can't have one law for everybody... that's stupid.