Quote

I am gagged and imprisoned. I can't even speak. I want to kick a football in a park with my son. Ordinary, banal life: my impossible dream.

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
Life
Parks
Son
Ordinary
Gagged
Football
Banal
Impossible
Imprisoned
Speak
Park
Dream
Kick
Even
Kicks

More quotes by Salman Rushdie

Image
As a writer, one of the things we all learned from the movies was a kind of compression that didn't exist before people were used to watching films. For instance, if you wanted to write a flashback in a novel, you once had to really contextualize it a lot, to set it up. Now, readers know exactly what you're doing. Close-ups, too.
Salman Rushdie
Image
I think it's a very important function of art to challenge accepted reality, especially when that reality is created by powerful interest groups.
Salman Rushdie
Image
The history of a culture can be determined by its untranslatable words.
Salman Rushdie
Image
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.
Salman Rushdie
Image
You can't have modern states based on ideas which have been out of date for a thousand years.
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
In the movies, the writer is just the servant, the employee.
Salman Rushdie
Image
Religion, a mediaeval form of unreason, when combined with modern weaponry becomes a real threat to our freedoms. This religious totalitarianism has caused a deadly mutation in the heart of Islam and we see the tragic consequences in Paris today.
Salman Rushdie
Image
People would come and threaten them. And they would respond by putting the book in the window. Behind that, the publishers, many of whom were menaced and receiving anonymous phone calls of the very menacing kind and so, almost everybody - not everybody, but almost everybody held the line.
Salman Rushdie
Image
There is nothing like a War for the reinvention of lives.
Salman Rushdie
Image
Normally when I read, I don't like music playing.
Salman Rushdie
Image
Our lives, our stories, flowed into one another's, were no longer our own, individual, discrete.
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
The suicide bomber's imagination leads him to believe in a brilliant act of heroism, when in fact he is simply blowing himself up pointlessly and taking other people's lives.
Salman Rushdie
Image
Something was badly amiss with the spiritual life of the planet...Too many demons inside people claiming to believe in God.
Salman Rushdie
Image
We must agree on what matters: kissing in public places, bacon sandwiches, disagreement, cutting-edge fashion, literature, generosity, water, a more equitable distribution of the world's resources, movies, music, freedom of thought, beauty, love.
Salman Rushdie
Image
We all owe death a life.
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
As I look back, I feel a touch of pride at my younger self's dedication to literature, which gave him the strength of mind to resist the blandishments of the enemies of promise. The sirens of ad-land sang sweetly and seductively, but I thought of Odysseus lashing himself to the mast of his ship, and somehow stayed on course.
Salman Rushdie
Image
Madame Bovary and a flying carpet, they are both untrue in the same way. Somebody made them up.
Salman Rushdie