Quote

Once you get that instinct for the fictiveness, the fictionality of fiction, it kind of sets you free.

Salman Rushdie

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Salman Rushdie
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: June 19
Actor
Essayist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Bombay
Rushdie
Joseph Anton
Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie
Sets
Instinct
Fiction
Free
Kind

More quotes by Salman Rushdie

Image
Human beings do not perceive things whole we are not gods but wounded creatures, cracked lenses, capably only of fractured perceptions. Partial beings, in all the senses of that phrase.
Salman Rushdie
Image
So when I studied history at Cambridge, I did a special subject in that, exactly that. And then actually that - while I was studying it was where I came across the so-called incident of the satanic verses.
Salman Rushdie
Image
I do think there was a period there when my sanity was under intense pressure, and I didn't know what to say or do or how to act. I was literally living from day to day.
Salman Rushdie
Image
I'm not a prophet, but I always thought it was natural for dictatorships to fall. I remember in 1989, two months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, had you said it was going to happen no one would have believed you. The system seemed powerful and unbreakable. Suddenly overnight it blew away like dust.
Salman Rushdie
Image
Certainly, poverty and economic decline have a lot to do with the so-called rage of Islam. You've got all these young men in countries which are economically in bad shape. The idea that they might be able to make a good living and get married and have a family, a decent life, seems very remote to a lot of people in a lot of the world.
Salman Rushdie
Image
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
Image
I'm a novelist. Fortunately I don't have to rule the world.
Salman Rushdie
Image
It is very, very easy not to be offended by a book. You just have to shut it.
Salman Rushdie
Image
The USA approach looks like bullying because it is.
Salman Rushdie
Image
It doesn't matter whether characters are real people or not if they're not vivid on the page, then the reader doesn't care about them that much, and, if the reader doesn't care about them that much, then they don't care what happens to them.
Salman Rushdie
Image
When you're writing for the screen you're really thinking all the time of what you have to do to make sure that they have the information that they need, that the emotional thread is not snapped, that the story moves at the right speed, to keep the audience hopefully sitting on the edge of their seats or else weeping or laughing.
Salman Rushdie
Image
Religion is responsible for a lot of the problems in the history of the world and it's not something that I practice or recommend, but to each his own.
Salman Rushdie
Image
Doubt, it seems to me, is the central condition of a human being in the twentieth century.
Salman Rushdie
Image
One minute you've got a lucky star watching over you and the next instant it's done a bunk.
Salman Rushdie
Image
Live on, survive, for the earth gives forth wonders. It may swallow your heart, but the wonders keep on coming. You stand before them bareheaded, shriven. What is expected of you is attention.
Salman Rushdie
Image
Unfortunately, the problem of the free speech argument is that you have to defend people you can't stand.
Salman Rushdie
Image
If the culture shifts, if people think differently about women, the art will shift, too. You can't ask art to make social change. It's not what it's for.
Salman Rushdie
Image
I don't know what to say about literary critics. I think it's probably best to say nothing.
Salman Rushdie
Image
No people whose word for 'yesterday' is the same as their word for 'tomorrow' can be said to have a firm grip on the time.
Salman Rushdie
Image
When you throw everything up in the air anything becomes possible.
Salman Rushdie