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
The suicide bomber's imagination leads him to believe in a brilliant act of heroism, when in fact he is simply blowing himself up pointlessly and taking other people's lives.
The worst, most insidious effect of censorship is that, in the end, it can deaden the imagination of the people. Where there is no debate, it is hard to go on remembering, every day, that there is a suppressed side to every argument.
It is literature which for me opened the mysterious and decisive doors of imagination and understanding. To see the way others see. To think the way others think. And above all, to feel.
I do think of Bombay as my hometown. Those are the streets I walked when I was learning to walk. And it's the place that my imagination has returned to more than anywhere else.
Few topographical boundaries can rival the frontiers of the mind.
What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry.
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.
The world is about the way in which our dreams intersect with our real life. Endlessly, the world of the imagination changes the world.
I've been gradually reclaiming all kinds of freedoms over these years..,
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.
Both are responsible. But I know when I write a book it's my name on the book, so I stand or fall by what I sign. And so must she.
From such defensive, separated worlds some youngsters have indefensibly stepped across a moral line and taken up their lethal rucksacks, ... The deeper alienations that lead to terrorism may have their roots in these young men's objections to events in Iraq or elsewhere, but the closed communities of some traditional Western Muslims are places in which young men's alienations can easily deepen.
Many writers who have had to deal with the subject of atrocity can't face it head-on.
Meanwhile, it seems, the world is suffering from compassion fatigue,