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
Salman Rushdie quotes about
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.
Make as much racket as you like people. Noise is life and an excess of noise is a sign that life is good. There will be time for us all to be quiet when we are safely dead.
Fundamentalism isn't about religion, it's about power.
What's the use of stories that aren't even true?
Not all possibilities are open to us. The world is finite; our hopes spill over its rim.
Perhaps the story you finish is never the one you begin.
You can't judge an internal injury by the size of the hole.
Everest silences you...when you come down, nothing seems worth saying, nothing at all. You find the nothingness wrapping you up, like a sound. Non-being. You can't keep it up, of course. the world rushes in soon enough. What shuts you up is, I think, the sight you've had of perfection: why speak if you can't manage perfect thoughts, perfect sentences? It feels like a betrayal of what you've been through. But it fades; you accept that certain compromises, closures, are required if you're to continue.
Masks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull.
Exile is a dream of a glorious return. Exile is a vision of revolution: Elba, not St Helena. It is an endless paradox: looking forward by always looking back. The exile is a ball hurled high into the air.
Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems - but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible.
My heart broke open and history fell in.
Rock and roll music - the music of freedom frightens people and unleashes all manner of conservative defense mechanisms.
Names, once they are in common use, quickly become mere sounds, their etymology being buried, like so many of the earth's marvels, beneath the dust of habit.