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
The time-honored role of the artist [is] to speak truth to power.
Why speak if you can't manage perfect thoughts, perfect sentences?
One of the things a writer is for is to say the unsayable, speak the unspeakable and ask difficult questions.
Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true.
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.
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.
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.
Writers shouldn't have lives that are interesting. It gets in the way of your work.
For the record, there is a French project to make a theatrical adaptation of The Satanic Verses, so maybe that's a start.
I accept there are people out there who don't like me. I don't like them.
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.
The reason why books endure is because there are enough people who like them. It's the only reason why books last.