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Salman Rushdie Quotes - Page 22

All Quotes Age Arguing Art Atheism Atheist Belief Betrayal Birth Blasphemy Censorship Challenges Character Childhood Children Choices Christianity Conflict Country Crime Criticism Culture Desire Destiny Doubt Evil Falling In Love Fate Feelings Fighting Film Free Speech Freedom Freedom Of Speech Fun Giving Growing Up Growth Hate Heart Hell History Home Honesty Human Nature Identity Imagination Islam Journey Language Liberty Life Literature Loss Love Lying Magic Memories Mountain Optimism Past Perception Perspective Pride Prophet Reading Reality Religion Revolution Running Safety Satire School Shame Silence Son Soul Speed Storytelling Struggle Study Terrorism Tolerance Values Victory Violence War Water Worry Writing

Original thought, original artistic expression is by its very nature questioning, irreverent, iconoclastic.

Original thought, original artistic expression is by its very nature questioning, irreverent, iconoclastic.

Expression, Original Thought, Artistic

American literature has always been immigrant.

Literature, American Literature, Immigrants

"Salman Rushdie: the fatwa, Islamic fundamentalism and Joseph Anton". Interview with Stuart Jeffries, www.theguardian.com. September 16, 2012.

Mo Yan is the Chinese equivalent of the Soviet Russian apparatchik writer Mikhail Sholokhov: a patsy of the regime.

Chinese, Regimes, Soviet

"Literary Feuds of 2012" by Rachel Arons, www.newyorker.com. December 30, 2012.

All my adult life, if I didn't have several hours a day to sit in a room by myself, I would get antsy and irritable.

Adults, Rooms, Hours

I've never yet managed to write a novel which didn't have an Indian central character.

Writing, Character, Novel

If bigots behave like bigots, it's not a huge surprise.

Surprise, Behave, Bigots

If Turkey wants to join Europe, it will have to become a European country, and that might take a long time.

Country, Europe, Turkeys

"Salman Rushdie: Inside the Mind of Jihadists". Interview with Nathan Gardels, www.huffingtonpost.com. May 25, 2011.

...The lesson [comic books] taught children- or this child, at any rate- was perhaps the unintentionally radical truth that exceptionality was the greatest and most heroic of values; that those who were unlike the crowd were to be treasured the most lovingly; and that this exceptionality was a treasure so great that it had to be concealed, in ordinary life, beneath what the comic books called a 'secret identity'.

Children, Book, Secret Identity

The act of migration puts into crisis everything about the migrating individual or group, everything about identity and selfhood and culture and belief. So if this is a novel about migration it must be that act of putting in question. It must perform the crisis it describes.

Identity, Migration, Groups

Broad-mindedness is related to tolerance; open-mindedness is the sibling of peace.

Sibling, Tolerance, Broads

Home has become such a scattered, damaged, various concept in our present travails. There is so much to yearn for. There are so few rainbows any more.

Home, Rainbow, Various

Salman Rushdie (2014). “East, West: Stories”, p.74, Vintage

It's Kennedy's war, Vietnam. Lyndon Johnson got all the flak, but it's Kennedy's war.

War, Vietnam, Johnson

Rock n' roll was a kid when I was a kid.

Kids, Rocks, Rock N Roll

Khattam-Shud,' he said slowly, 'is the Arch-Enemy of all Stories, even of language itself. He is the Prince of Silence and the Foe of Speech. And because everything ends, because dreams end, stories end, life ends, at the finish of everything we use his name. "It's finished," we tell one another, "it's over. Khattam-Shud: The End.

Dream, Names, Silence

Salman Rushdie (1990). “Haroun and the Sea of Stories”, Penguin Books

The beautiful came to this city [Hollywood] in huge pathetic herds, to suffer, to be humiliated, to see the powerful currency of their beauty devalued like the Russian ruble or Argentine peso;to work as bellhops, as bar hostesses, as garbage collectors, as maids. The city was a cliff and they were its stampeding lemmings. At the foot of the cliff was the valley of the broken dolls.

Beautiful, Powerful, Feet

What I've always tried to find in my books are points at which the private lives of the characters, and also my own, intersect with the public life of the culture.

Book, Character, Culture

Thomas Pynchon looks exactly like Thomas Pynchon should look. He is tall, he wears lumberjack shirts and blue jeans. He has Albert Einstein white hair and Bugs Bunny front teeth.

Hair, Blue, Jeans

This paranoid Islam, which blames outsider, 'infidels', for all the ills of Muslim societies, and whose proposed remedy is the closing of those societies to the rival project of modernity, is presently the fastest growing version of Islam in the world.

Islam, World, Growing

Salman Rushdie (2008). “Step Across This Line”, p.218, Random House

I've never read anything so badly written that got published. It made 'Twilight' look like 'War and Peace.'

War, Twilight, Looks

The thing I really like about Twitter is the speed with which information reaches me. You find out things from Twitter long before they're on the news. That, I think, is valuable.

Thinking, Long, News

"The Art of Bravery: An Interview with Salman Rushdie". Interview with Shaun Randol, lareviewofbooks.org. April 25, 2013.

The thing about literature is that, yes, there are kind of tides of fashion, you know; people come in and out of fashion; writers who are very celebrated fall into, you know, people you know stop reading them, and then it comes back again.

Fashion, Fall, Reading

The Koran was revealed at a time of great change in the Arab world, the seventh-century shift from a matriarchal nomadic culture to an urban patriarchal system.

Culture, World, Urban

The interesting thing about history sometimes. is that you know these people existed, and you knew what jobs they did, but you don't know much about them as people, so you actually have to make them up.

Jobs, People, Interesting

Few topographical boundaries can rival the frontiers of the mind.

Imagination, Mind, Rivals

The field of the novel is very rich. If you're a composer, you're well aware of the history of composition, and you are trying to make your music part of that history. You're not ahistorical. In the same way, I think, if you write now, you are writing in the historical context of what the novel has been and what possibilities it has revealed.

Writing, Thinking, Historical

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