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
If you live in free countries, you don't have to spend all your life arguing about freedom because it is all around you. It seems redundant to make a lot of noise about something when, in fact, there it is. But if someone tries to remove it, it becomes important for you to formulate your own defenses of it.
The enemy for the fanatic is pleasure, which makes it extremely important to continue to indulge in pleasure. Dance madly. That is how you get rid of terrorism.
Raif Badawi's is an important voice for all of us to hear.
The West sees Iran as an important force in the gulf.
Friendships are the family we make - not the one we inherit. I've always been someone to whom friendship, elective affinities, is as important as family.
I do have a lot of time for people in my life, and friendship is a very important subject for me. I think I'm unusual among the writers I know in that respect.
It's always been colossally important to me that my books should be well received in India. It's where I come from.
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.
Stories in families are colossally important. Every family has stories: some funny, some proud, some embarrassing, some shameful. Knowing them is proof of belonging to the family.
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.