Salman Rushdie Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie is a British Indian novelist and essayist. He first achieved fame with his second novel, Midnight's Children , which won the Booker Prize in 1981. Much of his early fiction is set on the Indian subcontinent. His style is more..

“ Salman Rushdie: A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return. #Books - Reading

“ Salman Rushdie: 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. #Religion

“ 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. #Books - Reading

“ Salman Rushdie: Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself. #Freedom of Speech

“ Salman Rushdie: In this world without quiet corners, there can be no easy escapes from history, from hullabaloo, from terrible, unquiet fuss. #Stress

“ Salman Rushdie: 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. #Language

“ Salman Rushdie: 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. #Conversion

“ Salman Rushdie: 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. #Communism and Socialism

“ Salman Rushdie: Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts. #Myth

“ Salman Rushdie: 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. #Reality

“ Salman Rushdie: 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. #Literature

“ Salman Rushdie: 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. #Fiction

“ Salman Rushdie: 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. #Fiction

“ Salman Rushdie: Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory. #Writers and Writing

“ Salman Rushdie: 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. #Fanatics and Fanaticism

“ Salman Rushdie: 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. #Writers and Writing

“ Salman Rushdie: 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. #Exile

“ Salman Rushdie: 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. #Arts and Artists

“ Salman Rushdie: When thought becomes excessively painful, action is the finest remedy. #Thoughts and Thinking

“ Salman Rushdie: Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one. #Writers and Writing

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