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 inevitable triumph of illusion over reality that was the single most obvious truth about the history of the human race.
I have been only the humblest jugglers-with-facts; and that, in a country where the truth is what it is instructed to be, reality quite literally ceases to exist, so that everything becomes possible except what we are told is the case; and maybe this was the difference between my Indian childhood and Pakistani adolescence--that in the first I was beset by an infinity of alternative realities, while in the second I was adrift, disoriented, amid an equally infinite number of falsenesses, unrealities and lies.
The world, somebody wrote, is the place we prove real by dying in it.
Realism can break a writer's heart.
What's real and what's true aren't necessarily the same.
I do not need the idea of God to explain the world I live in.
Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts.
Most of what matters in your life takes place in your absence.
This strange business of what it is to be a writer is this increasingly insane world in which we live, in which surrealism, it seems, is the new realism.
We all dream things into being; you imagine yourself having a child, and then you have a child. An inventor will think of something in his mind and then make it actual. So things are often passing from the imagined realm into the real world.
That's the trouble with you sad-city types: a place has to be miserable and dull as ditchwater before you believe it's real.
A man is sane only to the extent that he subscribes to a previously-agreed construction of reality.
I don't feel American. I do feel like a New Yorker. I think there's a real distinction there. A city allows you to become a citizen even when you're not a national.
In a novel, if you're any good, you don't just have good people or bad people. You have complicated people. You have real people.