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
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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.
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I think it's a stupid way to read a book, ... to say that because something happens to one person the author is trying to suggest that all people are like this. The novel is the art of the particular. And I'm talking about a particular person whose development from innocence to guilt, if you like, is his own particular narrative arc. The point is to make that coherent - not to read the book as some kind of simple allegory, but to read it as a story about a person.
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Susan Sontag was a great literary artist,"a fearless and original thinker, ever valiant for truth, and an indefatigable ally in many struggles.
You can take the boy out of Bombay; you can't take Bombay out of the boy, you know.
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wants the dreadful, wants to stare down the human race's worst-case scenarios.
Whenever I write something, I always want to make sure that what I write is defensible.
work writers
Writers shouldn't have lives that are interesting. It gets in the way of your work.
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From such defensive, separated worlds some youngsters have indefensibly stepped across a moral line and taken up their lethal rucksacks, ... The deeper alienations that lead to terrorism may have their roots in these young men's objections to events in Iraq or elsewhere, but the closed communities of some traditional Western Muslims are places in which young men's alienations can easily deepen.
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For the record, there is a French project to make a theatrical adaptation of The Satanic Verses, so maybe that's a start.
people
I accept there are people out there who don't like me. I don't like them.
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Both are responsible. But I know when I write a book it's my name on the book, so I stand or fall by what I sign. And so must she.
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The reason why books endure is because there are enough people who like them. It's the only reason why books last.
compassion suffering
Meanwhile, it seems, the world is suffering from compassion fatigue,
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Life is fury, he'd thought. Fury sexual, Oedipal, political, magical, brutal drives us to our finest heights and coarsest depths. Out of furia comes creation, inspiration, originality, passion, but also violence, pain, pure unafraid destruction, the giving and receiving of blows from which we never recover. The Furies pursue us; Shiva dances his furious dance to create and also to destroy. But never mind about gods! Sara ranting at him represented the human spirit in its purest, least socialized form. This is what we are, what we civilize ourselves to disguise the terrifying human animal in us, the exalted, transcendent, self-destructive, untramelled lord of creation.