Latest Salman Rushdie Quotes from Interviews

• I'd wanted to create a storm so that I could become more famous and richer.

  Salman Rushdie

  Tormenta

  Fuente: www.guernicamag.com

• I needed my stuff around me, and in that little cocoon I felt good, and I could work.

  Salman Rushdie

  Fuente: www.guernicamag.com

• 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. In terms of actually tweeting myself, I have just lost enthusiasm for it. Maybe I'll do some of it this week to tell people about the PEN Festival and encourage them to show up.

  Salman Rushdie

  Pensar, Largo, Gente

  Fuente: pen.org

• It's difficult not to color our perception of author's product with his personality. There are so many examples of this. What do we think of Ezra Pound - clearly a great poet and clearly kind of an asshole? You can say the same thing about Louis-Ferdinand Céline, who clearly was a Nazi sympathizer, and yet one of the great writers of the 20th century. It is tough, but there are enough examples around where we have to somehow find a way of separating the work from the artist and seeing what there is to see in the work, while also condemning the thoughts we see in the man.

  Salman Rushdie

  Artist, Men, Thinking

  Fuente: pen.org

• In our time, we have become too interested in the artist and his or her character and experience as a way of understanding art. In my view, you should be able to read a book or see a film without knowing a single thing about conditions or circumstances or character of the artist, and experience the work to the full without such information. Sometimes I feel - speaking for myself - that people know much too much about me, and I wish people knew less and could just read these books and respond to them purely as words on a page.

  Salman Rushdie

  Arte, Libro, Personaje

  Fuente: pen.org

• One of the problems of truth being censored for a really long time is that people lose the ability to intuit what truth might be, and therefore begin to swallow whatever they're fed. I think that's something that the Chinese have learned very well. They've even managed to persuade quite large segments of the population that the martyrs of Tiananmen were actually an anti-national element. People don't view them as heroes, they see them as troublemakers. There you have a combination of censorship of truth creating a new truth, which is the lie, but it's not seen as such.

  Salman Rushdie

  Lying, Hero, Thinking

  Fuente: pen.org

• The desire for story is very, very deep in human beings. We are the only creature in the world that does this; we are the only creature that tells stories, and sometimes those are true stories and sometimes those are made up stories. Then there are the larger stories, the grand narratives that we live in, which are things like nation and family and clan and so on. Those stories are considered to be treated reverentially. They need to be part of the way in which we conduct the discourse of our lives and to prevent people from doing something very damaging to human nature.

  Salman Rushdie

  People, Desire, World

  Fuente: pen.org

• In the end, the thing that's important about free expression is that it's the right from which all other rights are derived. If you can't articulate ideas and if you can't articulate critiques of other peoples' ideas, then you're powerless. What always increases the power of an authoritarian regime is whether it can successfully prevent people from expressing themselves.

  Salman Rushdie

  People, Important, Critique

  Fuente: pen.org

• There's no point going to a country which is torturing people to ask them to stop if they can point out that the United States is doing it too. It enormously weakens the argument. Back in the early days of the Bush administration, PEN made a decision that we would try and make human rights issues and civil rights issues in this country part of the priority, and not just international issues, which had more or less been the priority up until then.

  Salman Rushdie

  Country, People, Priorities

  Fuente: pen.org

• I have a general feeling that writers and artists who are in this peculiar situation, of being a persecuted artist, all anyone ever asks about is the persecution. It may well be that's the last thing in the world they want to talk about. There were many years in which every journalist in the world wanted to talk to me, but nobody wanted to talk to me about my work. That felt deeply frustrating because I felt there was an attempt to stifle me as an artist. The best revenge I could have was to write.

  Salman Rushdie

  Revenge, Writing, Artist

  Fuente: pen.org

• I suppose authoritarians don't like being made fun of because authoritarian rulers have a very inflated sense of themselves and don't like being deflated, which makes it all the more important to continue to deflate them. These are very courageous people around the world who poke fun from inside these societies. So, we now have to broaden the definition of what we mean by "writer" to include bloggers, cartoonists, song writers, visual artists - all these people are, in different ways, quite brave.

  Salman Rushdie

  Song, Fun, Mean

  Fuente: pen.org

• One of the strange things about violent and authoritarian regimes is they don't like the glare of negative publicity. If you can make them sufficiently uncomfortable, they frequently respond by doing what you need them to do in the spirit of setting people free or ceasing arrests, which has worked time and time again with PEN.

  Salman Rushdie

  People, Negative, Spirit

  Fuente: pen.org

• The PEN/Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to Write Award is a way of spotlighting individual cases. If you look at the history of the award, the freedom rate is very high: a very high percentage of people who receive those awards are freed in the next six months to a year. The only weapon there is attention, but interestingly it works.

  Salman Rushdie

  Writing, People, Attention

  Fuente: pen.org

• It's true that the human body is more vulnerable than the products of the human mind. We need to protect artists and journalists people to allow them to work.

  Salman Rushdie

  Artist, People, Mind

  Fuente: pen.org

• Vulnerability of artists is definitely what makes organizations like PEN necessary because, as I tried to argue, the actual work that writers and artists do has an ornery way of surviving. Particularly in this age of the internet, it is very easy for forbidden work to be found online somewhere if you know where to look. Artists themselves, however, are in increasing danger, and not just artists. The great concern is that year after year, rising numbers of journalists are being killed in pursuit of their work.

  Salman Rushdie

  Artist, Age, Arguing

  Fuente: pen.org

• The most obvious inspiration to be brave is that we all feel it: you can't have free expression right now in a very wide range of countries. It takes a lot of guts for writers and journalists in those countries to stand up against repression and do what they do. Russia is a case in point where, as you know, journalists have an embarrassing habit of being killed for their reporting.

  Salman Rushdie

  Country, Inspiration, Brave

  Fuente: pen.org

• For me, what I've always seen in writers and artists is the courage it takes to make an original work of art. I think the real risks in literature are linguistic and intellectual, and I hope we can highlight those, as well as political courage.

  Salman Rushdie

  Arte, Real, Pensamiento

  Fuente: pen.org

• No importa si los personajes son personas reales o no; si no son vívidos en la página, entonces el lector no se preocupa tanto por ellos y, si el lector no se preocupa tanto por ellos, entonces no le importa lo que les pase.

  Salman Rushdie

  Real, Carácter, Gente

  Fuente: www.guernicamag.com

• What I do think is evident is that those countries in the world where Islamic extremism has recovered the most power, those are also the countries which are most disliked.

  Salman Rushdie

  Country, Islamic, Thinking

  Fuente: www.teachingbooks.net

• The rate of change is global now. I think there's a kind of mind that is so ill at ease with that transformation that it reaches out for something permanent. And religious faith offers that, from simplicities, which you are told are eternal and unchanging, and you can hold on to those like a life raft in a metamorphosing world.

  Salman Rushdie

  Religious, Thinking, Simplicity

  Fuente: www.teachingbooks.net

• You've got a generation of young men - almost all are young men - in situations of great economic hardship, where they don't really have work. The chances of them making a decent life for themselves, of making a family, living in a kind of decent, happy way, are very, very remote. It's very hard for them to ever even have that as a dream, so when people are that deprived of the ordinary hope of human beings, it creates anger. And that anger can be channeled by unscrupulous persons, whether secular or religious leaders, and there's been a lot of that.

  Salman Rushdie

  Dream, Religious, Men

  Fuente: www.teachingbooks.net

• We live in an age where the rate of change has been colossal. Colossal. Almost every week there's some transformation of some kind, whether technological or political or scientific, whatever. And I think it's bewildering to human beings to live in a time when they can't take anything as fixed - when everything is shifting and changing all the time.

  Salman Rushdie

  Thinking, Political, Age

  Fuente: www.teachingbooks.net

• The only position when violence is threatened in response to a novel or a cartoon or a crappy YouTube video is a no-surrender position. This is how we live. We live in a country in which we have these rights, and we're not going to give them up. Full stop. The end.

  Salman Rushdie

  País, Derechos, Dar

  Fuente: www.teachingbooks.net

• If you give in to the threat of violence, if you give in to bullying, what you know is that there will be more bullying. There will not be less bullying. If you appease the bully, you make sure that he will bully you some more. Not less. It doesn't solve the problem. It makes the problem worse.

  Salman Rushdie

  Bullying, Giving, Violence

  Fuente: www.teachingbooks.net

• It seems to me it's perfectly possible to vehemently disagree with a piece of work and to say that it's offensive and insulting and so on and so on. And you're absolutely entitled to do that and to speak back, if you like, against that piece of speech with all the vehemence at your disposal. I mean, that's legitimate. Even other things. People have a right to demonstrate.

  Salman Rushdie

  Mean, People, Insulting

  Fuente: www.teachingbooks.net

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