Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie (b.1947) is an Indian-born British novelist whose writing on touchy religious and political themes have made him a controversial literary célèbre.
Born to a well-to-do Muslim family in Bombay, India, and educated at Cambridge, Rushdie worked as an actor and as an advertising copywriter before taking up writing full-time after the massive success of his second novel, the Booker Prize-winning Midnight’s Children (1981.)
The Satanic Verses (1988) made Rushdie a household name. This novel provoked the denunciation of Islāmic authorities who decried it blasphemous. Its sale was banned in India, Pakistan, South Africa, and Iran. In 1989, Muslims in England burned copies of the novel, and protests in Pakistan resulted in killings and injuries. Rushdie was sentenced to death by Iranian religious leader Ayatollah Khomeini. In 1998, the Iranian government revoked the death sentence, and Rushdie returned to public life.
Rushdie’s other notable works include The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995,) The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999,) Fury (2001,) Shalimar the Clown (2005,) and The Enchantress of Florence (2008.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Salman Rushdie
If Woody Allen were a Muslim, he’d be dead by now.
—Salman Rushdie
Topics: Tolerance
The novel does not seek to establish a privileged language but it insists upon the freedom to portray and analyze the struggle between the different contestants for such privileges.
—Salman Rushdie
Topics: Fiction, Authors & Writing
We must conclude that it is not only a particular political ideology that has failed, but the idea that men and women could ever define themselves in terms that exclude their spiritual needs.
—Salman Rushdie
Topics: Socialism, Communism
Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, the power to retell it, rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change, truly are powerless, because they cannot think new thoughts.
—Salman Rushdie
Topics: Storytelling
For the barbarians were not only at our gates but within our skins. We were our own wooden horses, each one of us full of our own doom. ….these fanatics or those, or crazies or yours; but the explosions burst out of our very own bodies. We were both the bombers and the bombs. The explosions were our own evil – no need to look for foriegn explanations, though there was and is evil beyond our frontiers as well as within. We have chopped away our own legs, we engineered our own fall. And now we can only weep, at the last, for what we were too enfeebled, too corrupt, too little, too contemptable to defend.
—Salman Rushdie
Topics: Terrorism, One liners, Idleness
The only privilege literature deserves—and this privilege it requires in order to exist—is the privilege of being in the arena of discourse, the place where the struggle of our languages can be acted out.
—Salman Rushdie
Topics: Books, Literature
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.
—Salman Rushdie
Topics: Books
Most of what matters in your life takes place in your absence.
—Salman Rushdie
Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.
—Salman Rushdie
Topics: Speech
If you want to tell the untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you’ve got to find a language. Which goes for film as well as prose, for documentary as well as autobiography. Use the wrong language, and you’re dumb and blind.
—Salman Rushdie
Topics: Language
Throughout human history, the apostles of purity, those who have claimed to possess a total explanation, have wrought havoc among mere mixed-up human beings.
—Salman Rushdie
Topics: Explanation, Fanaticism
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.
—Salman Rushdie
Topics: Identity, Names
A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return.
—Salman Rushdie
Topics: Wealth, Reading, Literature, Books, Luxury
Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.
—Salman Rushdie
Topics: Writing, Authors & Writing, Writers
What one writer can make in the solitude of one room is something no power can easily destroy.
—Salman Rushdie
Topics: Writers
When thought becomes excessively painful, action is the finest remedy.
—Salman Rushdie
Topics: Thought, Pain, Thoughts
Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems—but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems incredible.
—Salman Rushdie
Topics: Reality
Where there is no belief, there is no blasphemy.
—Salman Rushdie
The real risks for any artist are taken in pushing the work to the limits of what is possible, in the attempt to increase the sum of what it is possible to think. Books become good when they go to this edge and risk falling over it—when they endanger the artist by reason of what he has, or has not, artistically dared.
—Salman Rushdie
Topics: Change, Books, Reading, Literature
Such is the miraculous nature of the future of exiles: what is first uttered in the impotence of an overheated apartment becomes the fate of nations.
—Salman Rushdie
Topics: Exile
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.
—Salman Rushdie
Topics: Books, Literature, Art
Our lives teach us who we are.
—Salman Rushdie
Topics: Identity, Self-Knowledge
In this world without quiet corners, there can be no easy escapes from history, from hullabaloo, from terrible, unquiet fuss.
—Salman Rushdie
Topics: Stress
Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory.
—Salman Rushdie
Topics: Authors & Writing, Writers
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.
—Salman Rushdie
Topics: Religion
The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas—uncertainty, progress, change—into crimes.
—Salman Rushdie
Topics: Religion
I make no complaint. I am a writer. I do not accept my condition; I will strive to change it; but I inhabit it, I am trying to learn from it.
—Salman Rushdie
Topics: Writers, Authors & Writing, Writing
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.
—Salman Rushdie
Topics: Arts, Artists, Art
Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can’t forgive.
—Salman Rushdie
Topics: Authors & Writing, Writers
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.
—Salman Rushdie
Topics: Fiction, Authors & Writing
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