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
Ideas are interesting to me, and religions are a place where ideas have been very subtly embodied for thousands of years. All literature started as sacred literature.
I reluctantly concluded that there was no way for me to help bring into being the Muslim culture I'd dreamed of, the progressive, irreverent, skeptical, argumentative, playful and unafraid culture which is what I've always understood as freedom.... Actually Existing Islam ... which makes literalism a weapon and redescription a crime, will never let the likes of me in.
I determined to make my peace with Islam, even at the cost of my pride. Those who were surprised and displeased by what I did perhaps failed to see that ... I wanted to make peace between the warring halves of the world, which were also the warring halves of my soul.
I am gagged and imprisoned. I can't even speak. I want to kick a football in a park with my son. Ordinary, banal life: my impossible dream.
Human beings do not perceive things whole; we are not gods but wounded creatures, cracked lenses, capably only of fractured perceptions. Partial beings, in all the senses of that phrase.
For many people, I've ceased to be a human being. I've become an issue, a bother, an "affair".... And has it really been so long since religions persecuted people, burning them as heretics, drowning them as witches, that you can't recognize religious persecution when you see it?
English, no longer, an English language, now grows from many roots.
Bread and books: food for the body and food for the soul - what could be more worthy of our respect, and even love?
That's the trouble with you sad-city types: a place has to be miserable and dull as ditchwater before you believe it's real.
[My work] is a love song to our mongrel selves.
As human knowledge has grown, it has also become plain that every religious story ever told about how we got here is quite simply wrong. This, finally, is what all religions have in common. They didn't get it right.
Some people are paralyzed by the consciousness of death, other people live with it.... The fatwa certainly made me think about it a lot more than I ever had. I guess I know I'm going to die, but then, so are you.
Among the great struggles of man-good/evil, reason/unreason, etc.-there is also this mighty conflict between the fantasy of Home and the fantasy of Away, the dream of roots and the mirage of the journey.
Our lives are not what we deserve; they are, let us agree, in many ways deficient.