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
If Woody Allen were a Muslim, he'd be dead by now.
Censorship is the thing that stops you doing what you want to do, and what writers want to talk about is what they do, not what stops them doing it.
So when I studied history at Cambridge, I did a special subject in that, exactly that. And then actually that - while I was studying it was where I came across the so-called incident of the satanic verses.
Freedom to reject is the only freedom.
Literature is the one place in any society where, within the secrecy of our own heads, we can hear voices talking about everything in every possible way.
If there is a choice between absolute safety and freedom, then freedom must always prevail.
When you write, you write out of your best self. Everything else drops away.
God, Satan, Paradise, and Hell all vanished one day in my fifteenth year, when I quite abruptly lost my faith. ... and afterwards, to prove my new-found atheism, I bought myself a rather tasteless ham sandwich, and so partook for the first time of the forbidden flesh of the swine. No thunderbolt arrived to strike me down. ... From that day to this I have thought of myself as a wholly secular person.
There is no alternative to the peaceful coexistence of cultures.
I think people direct good films when they feel personal to them, not because it's a famous book or something. It has to something move over that and somehow become personal to the director.
But love is what we want, not freedom. Who then is the unluckier man? The beloved, who is given his heart's desire and must for ever after fear its loss, or the free man, with his unlooked-for liberty, naked and alone between the captive armies of the earth?
A sigh isn't just a sigh. We inhale the world and breathe out meaning. While we can. While we can.
Where there is no belief, there is no blasphemy.
If you were standing next to the prophet on the mountain, would you have seen the archangel? And my answer to that was probably not, even though it's supposed to be a really big archangel. He describes it as - the Archangel Gabriel as standing on the horizon and filling the sky. That's a big angel.