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| Salman Rushdie
... able to bathe in the blesed oblivion of other people's lives. ... since the past exists only to encapsulate them, it is possible to create past events simply by saying they occurred. A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return. A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep. An overdose of reality gave birth to a miasmic longing for the flight into the safety of dreams. Be sure that you go to the author to get at his meaning, not to find yours. Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one. Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself. Fundamentalism isn't about religion. It's about power. I do not envy people who think they have a complete explanation of the world, for the simple reason that they are obviously wrong. I don't think there is a need for an entity like God in my life. I hate admitting that my enemies have a point. 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. 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. If I were asked for a one-sentence soundbite on religion, I would say I was against it. If Woody allen were a Muslim, he'd be dead by now. In this world without quiet corners, there can be no easy escapes from history, from hullabaloo, from terrible, unquiet fuss. It is very, very easy not to be offended by a book. You just have to shut it. 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. Most of what matters in your life takes place in your absence. Names, once they are in common use, quickly become mere sounds, their etymology being buried, like so many of the earth's marvels, beneath the dust of habit. Nobody can face the world with his eyes open all the time. One of the extraordinary things about human events is that the unthinkable becomes thinkable. Our lives teach us who we are. 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. Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts. 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. 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. 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. The liveliness of literature lies in its exceptionality, in being the individual, idiosyncratic vision of one human being, in which, to our delight and great surprise, we may find our own vision reflected. 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. The only privilege literature deserves – and this privilege it requires in order to exist – is the privilege of being in the arena of discourse, the place where the struggle of our languages can be acted out. 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. 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. What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry. What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it cease to exist. What one writer can make in the solitude of one room is something no power can easily destroy. When thought becomes excessively painful, action is the finest remedy. Where there is no belief, there is no blasphemy. Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can't forgive. Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory. |
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