Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
The time-honored role of the artist [is] to speak truth to power.
Salman Rushdie
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Salman Rushdie
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: June 19
Actor
Essayist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Bombay
Rushdie
Joseph Anton
Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie
Roles
Speak
Artist
Truth
Power
Time
Honored
Role
More quotes by Salman Rushdie
Two things form the bedrock of any open society - freedom of expression and rule of law. If you don't have those things, you don't have a free country.
Salman Rushdie
If you actually want to change your world, there is a better way of doing it than blowing yourself up.
Salman Rushdie
The way you write a screenplay is that you close your eyes and run the movie in your head and then you write it down.
Salman Rushdie
War used to be something you could stand on the nearby hill and watch. Now we have total war everybody's in it. We have total economics as well. Everything affects everybody. The Malaysian currency shakes, and people around the world are seriously affected.
Salman Rushdie
If the creative artist worries if he will still be free tomorrow, then he will not be free today.
Salman Rushdie
I grew up in a family in which there was very little religion. My father wasn't religious at all. But he was really interested in the subject of, you know, the birth and growth of Islam. And he basically transmitted that interest to me.
Salman Rushdie
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
If I were asked for a one-sentence sound bite on religion, I would say I was against it.
Salman Rushdie
I've never had very high regard for therapists. I owe my health, my mental survival, to my friends and loved ones.
Salman Rushdie
Islam is unusual in that it's the only one of the great world religions which was born inside recorded history. That there's an enormous amount of factual historical record about the life of a prophet and about social conditions in Arabia at that time. So it's possible to look at the origin of Islam in a scholarly way.
Salman Rushdie
Our lives, our stories, flowed into one another's, were no longer our own, individual, discrete.
Salman Rushdie
What happened in Pakistan was that people were told: You're all Muslim, so now you're a country. As we saw in 1971 with the Bangladesh secession, the answer to that was: 'Oh no, we're not.'
Salman Rushdie
There is a widespread difficulty in the Muslim world, which has to do with how the people are taught about examining their own history. A whole range of stuff has been placed off limits.
Salman Rushdie
It is commonly and, I believe, accurately said of Pakistan that her women are much more impressive than her men.
Salman Rushdie
I don't like books that play to the gallery, but I've become more concerned with telling a story as clearly and engagingly as I can.
Salman Rushdie
Is birth always a fall?
Salman Rushdie
But I - and I just think it's very - one of the problems of defending the extraordinary principle of freedom of speech is that you have to defend freedom of speech for people like that too.
Salman Rushdie
I always thought the front line was the bookstores. And bookstores around America, around the world did astonishingly well. They held the line. They didn't chicken out. You know, they defended the book. They kept it in the front of the store.
Salman Rushdie
For every snake, there is a ladder for every ladder,a snake
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