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
Life is lived forward but is judged in reverse.
The only way of living in a free society is to feel that you have the right to say and do stuff.
For every snake, there is a ladder; for every ladder,a snake
When...did it become irrational to dislike religion, any religion, even to dislike it vehemently? When did reason get redescribed as unreason? When were the fairy stories of the superstitious placed above criticism, beyond satire? A religion was not a race. It was an idea, and ideas stood (or fell) because they were strong enough (or too weak) to withstand criticism, not because they were shielded from it. Strong ideas welcomed dissent.
Home has become such a scattered, damaged, various concept in our present travails. There is so much to yearn for. There are so few rainbows any more.
Khattam-Shud,' he said slowly, 'is the Arch-Enemy of all Stories, even of language itself. He is the Prince of Silence and the Foe of Speech. And because everything ends, because dreams end, stories end, life ends, at the finish of everything we use his name. "It's finished," we tell one another, "it's over. Khattam-Shud: The End.
You can find shame in every house, burning in an ashtray, hanging framed upon a wall, covering a bed. But nobody notices it any more.
We must conclude that it is not only a particular political ideology that has failed, but the idea that men and women could ever define themselves in terms that exclude their spiritual needs.
Life is elsewhere. Cross frontiers. Fly away.
Things, even people have a way of leaking into each other like flavours when you cook.
Don't you know girls have to fool people every day of their lives if they want to get anywhere?
One of the things a writer is for is to say the unsayable, speak the unspeakable and ask difficult questions.
No story comes from nowhere; new stories are born from old.
And so it is they who, between them, give me all the reasons for believing in none.