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
In the experience of art, time seems not to exist.
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.
If the culture shifts, if people think differently about women, the art will shift, too. You can't ask art to make social change. It's not what it's for.
The miniatures of the Mughal period are really the pinnacle of Indian artistic achievement. And not a single one of those paintings is done by an individual artist.
Self-censorship is a lie to yourself; if you are going to be trying to seriously create art, to create literary art, and you decide to hold back, to censor yourself, then you are a fool to yourself and it would be better that you kept your mouth shut and did not speak.
The time-honored role of the artist [is] to speak truth to power.
In the waking dreams our societies permit, in our myths, our arts, our songs, we celebrate the nonbelongers, the different ones, the outlaws, the freaks.
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.
All art began as sacred art, you know? I mean, all painting began as religious painting. All writing began as religious writing.
Original thought, original artistic expression is by its very nature questioning, irreverent, iconoclastic.
In television, the 60-minute series, 'The Wire' and 'Mad Men' and so on, the writer is the primary creative artist.
What I've always seen in writers and artists is the courage it takes to make an original work of art. I think the real risks in literature are linguistic and intellectual, and I hope we can highlight those, as well as political courage.
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.
I think it's a very important function of art to challenge accepted reality, especially when that reality is created by powerful interest groups.