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
To understand just one life you have to swallow the world ... do you wonder, then, that I was a heavy child?
Five mysteries hold the keys to the unseen: the act of love, and the birth of a baby, and the contemplation of great art, and being in the presence of death or disaster, and hearing the human voice lifted in song.
War used to be something you could stand on the nearby hill and watch. Now we have total war; everybody's in it. We have total economics as well. Everything affects everybody. The Malaysian currency shakes, and people around the world are seriously affected.
What had been (at the beginning) no bigger than a full stop had expanded into a comma, a word, a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter; now it was bursting into more complex developments, becoming, one might say, a book - perhaps an encylopaedia - even a whole language...
Literature is the one place in any society where, within the secrecy of our own heads, we can hear voices talking about everything in every possible way.
When you throw everything up in the air anything becomes possible.
Vertigo is the conflict between the fear of falling and the desire to fall.
It's always been colossally important to me that my books should be well received in India. It's where I come from.
When thought becomes excessively painful, action is the finest remedy.
Not all possibilities are open to us. The world is finite; our hopes spill over its rim.
Freedom to reject is the only freedom.
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.
I think it's a very important function of art to challenge accepted reality, especially when that reality is created by powerful interest groups.
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.