1948-, Indian-born British Author
A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return.
Salman Rushdie – [Books and Reading]
Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.
Salman Rushdie – [Writers and Writing]
Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.
Salman Rushdie – [Freedom of Speech]
I make no complaint. I am a writer. I do not accept my condition; I will strive to change it; but I inhabit it, I am trying to learn from it.
Salman Rushdie – [Writers and Writing]
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.
Salman Rushdie – [Conversion]
If Woody Allen were a Muslim, he'd be dead by now.
Salman Rushdie – [Intolerance]
If you want to tell the untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you've got to find a language. Which goes for film as well as prose, for documentary as well as autobiography. Use the wrong language, and you're dumb and blind.
Salman Rushdie – [Language]
In this world without quiet corners, there can be no easy escapes from history, from hullabaloo, from terrible, unquiet fuss.
Salman Rushdie – [Stress]
Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination and of the heart.
Salman Rushdie – [Literature]
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.
Salman Rushdie – [Names]
Not even the visionary or mystical experience ever lasts very long. It is for art to capture that experience, to offer it to, in the case of literature, its readers; to be, for a secular, materialist culture, some sort of replacement for what the love of god offers in the world of faith.
Salman Rushdie – [Arts and Artists]
One of the extraordinary things about human events is that the unthinkable becomes thinkable.
Salman Rushdie – [Events]
Our lives teach us who we are.
Salman Rushdie – [Self-knowledge]
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 incredible.
Salman Rushdie – [Reality]
Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts.
Salman Rushdie – [Myth]
Such is the miraculous nature of the future of exiles: what is first uttered in the impotence of an overheated apartment becomes the fate of nations.
Salman Rushdie – [Exile]
The acceptance that all that is solid has melted into the air, that reality and morality are not givens but imperfect human constructs, is the point from which fiction begins.
Salman Rushdie – [Fiction]
The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas — uncertainty, progress, change — into crimes.
Salman Rushdie – [Religion]
The liveliness of literature lies in its exceptionality, in being the individual, idiosyncratic vision of one human being, in which, to our delight and great surprise, we may find our own vision reflected.
Salman Rushdie – [Literature]
The novel does not seek to establish a privileged language but it insists upon the freedom to portray and analyze the struggle between the different contestants for such privileges.
Salman Rushdie – [Fiction]