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
Whenever I write something, I always want to make sure that what I write is defensible.
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.
Writers shouldn't have lives that are interesting. It gets in the way of your work.
There'll be one track that I like and a lot of it that is just wallpaper and sounds the same.
I've been gradually reclaiming all kinds of freedoms over these years..,
What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.
We have seen many other not just writers and intellectuals, but including writers and intellectuals in the Muslim world being attacked and murdered by Islamic fanatics, accused of exactly the same things that I was, these medieval crimes of apostasy And heresy, but then broadening from that into a broader attack on all of us.
Madame Bovary and a flying carpet, they are both untrue in the same way. Somebody made them up.
YouTube is full of pieces of trash. If you want to look on YouTube and find something that insults you, you can probably find it.
How do you defeat terrorism? Don’t be terrorized.
Laila Lalami has fashioned an absorbing story of one of the first encounters between Spanish conquistadores and Native Americans, a frightening, brutal, and much-falsified history that here, in her brilliantly imagined fiction, is rewritten to give us something that feels very like the truth.
Well, we're still in the middle of it. And it doesn't show any sign of going away. And these attacks that were - that seemed so odd at the time, with "Satanic Verses," because we didn't have any context for this. You know, where did that come from? It seemed to come out of nowhere.
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.
Rock and roll music - the music of freedom frightens people and unleashes all manner of conservative defense mechanisms.