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Salman Rushdie

Sir Salman Rushdie (born Ahmed Salman Rushdie, Urdu: أحمد سلمان رشدی, Hindi: अह्मद सलमान रश्डी on 19 June 1947) is an Indian-born British novelist and essayist. Most of his work is set on the Indian subcontinent.
 * See also:
 * Midnight's Children (1981)
 * The Satanic Verses (1988)
 * The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999)

1984–2002

 * It matters, it always matters, to name rubbish as rubbish ... to do otherwise is to legitimize it.
 * "Outside The Whale" in Granta (1984)

 * God, Satan, Paradise, and Hell all vanished one day in my fifteenth year, when I quite abruptly lost my faith. ... and afterwards, to prove my new-found atheism, I bought myself a rather tasteless ham sandwich, and so partook for the first time of the forbidden flesh of the swine. No thunderbolt arrived to strike me down. ... From that day to this I have thought of myself as a wholly secular person.
 * "In God We Trust" (1985)

 * Nowadays, however, a powerful tribe of clerics has taken over Islam. These are the contemporary Thought Police. They have turned Muhammad into a perfect being, his life into a perfect life, his revelation into the unambiguous, clear event it originally was not. Powerful taboos have been erected. One may not discuss Muhammad as if he were human, with human virtues and weaknesses. One may not discuss the growth of Islam as a historical phenomenon, as an ideology born out of its time. These are the taboos against which The Satanic Verses has transgressed (these and one other; I also tried to write about the place of women in Islamic society, and in the Koran). It is for this breach of taboo that the novel is being anathematized, fulminated against, and set alight.
 * The zealots also attack me by false analogy, comparing my book to pornography and demanding a ban on both. Many Islamic spokesmen have compared my work to anti-Semitism. But intellectual dissent is neither pornographic nor racist. I have tried to give a secular, humanist vision of the birth of a great world religion. For this, apparently, I should be tried under the Race Relations Act, or if not that perhaps the Public Order Act. Any old act will do. The justification is that I have "given offense." But the giving of offense cannot be a basis for censorship, or freedom of expression would perish instantly. And many of us who were revolted by the Bradford flames will feel that the offense done to our principles is at least as great as any offense caused to those who burned my book.
 * "The Book Burning" The New York Review of Books (March 2, 1989)

 * It is a funny view of the world that a book can cause riots.
 * (When asked if he apprehended riots) Interview with Shrabani Basu (September 1988), quoted in Elst, Koenraad (2001). ''Decolonizing the Hindu mind: Ideological development of Hindu revivalism\\. New Delhi: Rupa. p. 32

 * The responsibility for violence lies with those who perpetrate it.
 * "In Good Faith" (1990), p. 19

 * 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.
 * Herbert Reade Memorial Lecture (6 February 1990)

 * Those who oppose the novel most vociferously today are of the opinion that intermingling with a different culture will inevitably weaken and ruin their own. I am of the opposite opinion. The Satanic Verses celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs. It rejoices in mongrelization and fears the absolutism of the Pure. Melange, hotchpotch, a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the world. It is the great possibility that mass migration gives the world... The Satanic Verses is for change-by-fusion, change-by-conjoining. It is a love song to our mongrel selves.
 * Imaginary Homelands (1992)

 * What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.
 * Imaginary Homelands p. 391 (1992)

 * It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity. Which seems to be self-evidently true; but I suggest that the writer who is out-of-country and even out-of-language may experience this loss in an intensified form. It is made more concrete for him by the physical fact of discontinuity, of his present being in a different place from his past, of his being "elsewhere"... 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. Meaning is a shaky edifice we build out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old films, small victories, people hated, people loved; perhaps it is because of our sense of what is the case is constructed from such inadequate materials that we defend it so fiercely, even to the death.
 * Imaginary Homelands (1992)

 * I don't think there is a need for an entity like God in my life.
 * Salman Rushdie — Talking with David Frost (1993)

 * I do not envy people who think they have a complete explanation of the world, for the simple reason that they are obviously wrong.
 * Salman Rushdie — Talking with David Frost (1993)

 * 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 of the heart.
 * The Hindu (26 February 1995)

 * To make Gandhi appeal to the Western market, he had to be sanctified and turned into Christ – an odd fate for a crafty Gujarati lawyer – and the history of one of the century's greatest revolutions had to be mangled.
 * Salman Rushdie, quoted in Patrick French - Liberty or Death : India's Journey to Independence and Division (1998)

 * The only people who see the whole picture are the ones who step outside the frame.
 * The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999)

 * The fundamentalist seeks to bring down a great deal more than buildings. Such people are against, to offer just a brief list, freedom of speech, a multi-party political system, universal adult suffrage, accountable government, Jews, homosexuals, women's rights, pluralism, secularism, short skits, dancing, beardlessness, evolution theory, sex. There are tyrants, not Muslims. United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan has said that we should now define ourselves not only by what we are for but by what we are against. I would reverse that proposition, because in the present instance what we are against is a no brainer. Suicidist assassins ram wide-bodied aircraft into the World Trade Center and Pentagon and kill thousands of people: um, I'm against that. But what are we for? What will we risk our lives to defend? Can we unanimously concur that all the items in the preceding list — yes, even the short skirts and the dancing — are worth dying for? The fundamentalist believes that we believe in nothing. In his world-view, he has his absolute certainties, while we are sunk in sybaritic indulgences. To prove him wrong, we must first know that he is wrong. 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. These will be our weapons. Not by making war but by the unafraid way we choose to live shall we defeat them. How to defeat terrorism? Don't be terrorized. Don't let fear rule your life. Even if you are scared.
 * Step Across This Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992–2002

Midnight's Children (1981)

 * These are just a few sample quotes; for more quotes from this work see Midnight's Children

 * Children are the vessels into which adults pour their poison.

 * Who what am I? My answer: I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I've gone which would not have happened if I had not come. Nor am I particularly exceptional in this matter; each "I", everyone of the now-six-hundred-million-plus of us, contains a similar multitude. I repeat for the last time: to understand me, you'll have to swallow a world.

The Satanic Verses (1988)

 * 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.

 * The world, somebody wrote, is the place we prove real by dying in it.

Address at Columbia University (1991)

 * Excerpts From Rushdie's Address: 1,000 Days 'Trapped Inside a Metaphor' The New York Times (12 December 1991)

 * For many people, I've ceased to be a human being. I've become an issue, a bother, an "affair." ... And has it really been so long since religions persecuted people, burning them as heretics, drowning them as witches, that you can't recognize religious persecution when you see it? ... What is my single life worth? Despair whispers in my ear: "Not a lot." But I refuse to give in to despair ... because ... I know that many people do care, and are appalled by the ... upside-down logic of the post-fatwa world, in which a ... novelist can be accused of having savaged or "mugged" a whole community, becoming its tormentor (instead of its ... victim) and the scapegoat for ... its discontents... . (What minority is smaller and weaker than a minority of one?)

 * I determined to make my peace with Islam, even at the cost of my pride. Those who were surprised and displeased by what I did perhaps failed to see that ... I wanted to make peace between the warring halves of the world, which were also the warring halves of my soul... . The really important conversations I had in this period were with myself. I said: Salman, you must send a message loud enough to ... make ordinary Muslims see that you aren't their enemy, and you must make the West understand a little more of the complexity of Muslim culture ..., and start thinking a little less stereotypically... . And I said to myself: Admit it, Salman, the Story of Islam has a deeper meaning for you than any of the other grand narratives. Of course you're no mystic, mister... . No supernaturalism, no literalist orthodoxies ... for you. But Islam doesn't have to mean blind faith. It can mean what it always meant in your family, a culture, a civilization, as open-minded as your grandfather was, as delightedly disputatious as your father was. ... Don't let the zealots make Muslim a terrifying word, I urged myself; remember when it meant family. ... I reminded myself that I had always argued that it was necessary to develop the nascent concept of the "secular Muslim," who, like the secular Jew, affirmed his membership of the culture while being separate from the theology... . But, Salman, I told myself, you can't argue from outside the debating chamber. You've got to cross the threshold, go inside the room, and then fight for your humanized, historicized, secularized way of being a Muslim.

 * Too many people had spent too long demonizing or totemizing me to listen seriously to what I had to say. In the West, some "friends" turned against me, calling me by yet another set of insulting names. Now I was spineless, pathetic, debased; I had betrayed myself, my Cause; above all, I had betrayed them . I also found myself up against the granite, heartless certainties of Actually Existing Islam, by which I mean the political and priestly power structure that presently dominates and stifles Muslim societies. Actually Existing Islam has failed to create a free society anywhere on Earth, and it wasn't about to let me, of all people, argue in favor of one.

 * I reluctantly concluded that there was no way for me to help bring into being the Muslim culture I'd dreamed of, the progressive, irreverent, skeptical, argumentative, playful and unafraid culture which is what I've always understood as freedom. Not me, not in this lifetime, no chance. Actually Existing Islam, which has all but deified its Prophet, a man who always fought passionately against such deification, which has supplanted a priest-free religion by a priest-ridden one, which makes literalism a weapon and redescription a crime, will never let the likes of me in.

 * Ibn Rushd's ideas were silenced in their time. And throughout the Muslim world today, progressive ideas are in retreat. Actually Existing Islam reigns supreme, and just as the recently destroyed "Actually Existing Socialism" of the Soviet terror-state was horrifically unlike the utopia of peace and equality of which democratic socialists have dreamed, so also is Actually Existing Islam a force to which I have never given in, to which I cannot submit. There is a point beyond which conciliation looks like capitulation. I do not believe I passed that point, but others have thought otherwise.

 * "Our lives teach us who we are." I have learned the hard way that when you permit anyone else's description of reality to supplant your own — and such descriptions have been raining down on me, from security advisers, governments, journalists, Archbishops, friends, enemies, mullahs — then you might as well be dead. Obviously, a rigid, blinkered, absolutist world view is the easiest to keep hold of, whereas the fluid, uncertain, metamorphic picture I've always carried about is rather more vulnerable. Yet I must cling with all my might to ... my own soul; must hold on to its mischievous, iconoclastic, out-of-step clown-instincts, no matter how great the storm. And if that plunges me into contradiction and paradox, so be it; I've lived in that messy ocean all my life. I've fished in it for my art. This turbulent sea was the sea outside my bedroom window in Bombay. It is the sea by which I was born, and which I carry within me wherever I go. "Free speech is a non-starter," says one of my Islamic extremist opponents. No, sir, it is not. Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.

Salon interview (1996)

 * "The Salon Interview: Salman Rushdie: When life becomes a bad novel"

 * When I was growing up, everyone around me was fond of fooling around with words. It was certainly common in my family, but I think it is typical of Bombay, and maybe of India, that there is a sense of play in the way people use language. Most people in India are multilingual, and if you listen to the urban speech patterns there you'll find it's quite characteristic that a sentence will begin in one language, go through a second language and end in a third. It's the very playful, very natural result of juggling languages. You are always reaching for the most appropriate phrase.

 * It's fun to read things when you don't know all the words. Even children love it. One of the things any great children's writer will tell you is that children like it if in books designed for their age group there is a vocabulary just slightly bigger than theirs. So they come up against weird words, and the weird words excite them. If you describe a small girl in a story as "loquacious," it works so much better than “talkative.” And then some little girl will read the book and her sister will be shooting her mouth off and she will say to her sister, "Don't be so loquacious." It is a whole new weapon in her arsenal.

 * Nothing really improves us. Whatever improves one person will disimprove another. Some people are paralyzed by the consciousness of death, other people live with it. ... The fatwa certainly made me think about it a lot more than I ever had. I guess I know I'm going to die, but then, so are you. And one of the things that I thought a lot about at the time of the fatwa and ever since is that quite a few of the people I really care about died during this period, all about the same age as I am, and they were not under a death sentence. They just died, of lung cancer, AIDS, whatever. It occurred to me that you don't need a fatwa, it can happen anytime.

2005–2023

 * I've been worrying about God a little bit lately. It seems as if he's been lashing out, you know, destroying cities, annihilating places. It seems like he's been in a bad mood. And I think it has to do with the quality of lovers he's been getting. If you look at the people who love God now, you know, if I was God, I'd need to destroy something.
 * Real Time with Bill Maher TV show (7 October 2005)

 * What kind of God is it who's upset by a cartoon in Danish?
 * Interview with Bill Moyers, Bill Moyers on Faith & Reason (23 June 2006) - transcript

 * There were six hundred thousand Indian troops in Kashmir but the pogrom of the pandits was not prevented, why was that. Three and a half lakhs of human beings arrived in Jammu as displaced persons and for many months the government did not provide shelters or relief or even register their names, why was that.
 * Shalimar the Clown (2008), p. 296. Quoted in Sreyoshi Sarkar, "Shalimar the Clown and the Politics of “Worlding” the Kashmir Conflict", Commonwealth Essays and Studies, 39.1 | 2016.

 * 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.
 * The Times of India, ‘Don’t allow religious hooligans to dictate terms’ (16 January 2008)

 * The phrase of "crackdown" that the Indian army uses really is a euphemism of mass destruction. And rape. And brutalisation. That happens all the time. It's still happening now. … The decision to treat all Kashmiris as if they're potential terrorists is what has unleashed this, the kind of "holocaust" against the Kashmiri people. And we know ourselves, from most recent events in Europe, how important it is to resists treating all Muslims as if they're terrorists, but the Indian army has taken the decision to do the opposite of that, to actually decide that everybody is a potential combatant to treat them in that way. And the level of brutality is quite spectacular. And, frankly, without that the jihadists would have had very little response from the Kashmiri people who were not really traditionally interested in radical Islam. So now they're caught between the devil and the deep blue sea, and that's the tragedy of the place.
 * In "Interview with Salman Rushdie: Kashmir, Paradise lost", Qantara.de (October 2009)

 * In an ideal world you could reunite the Pakistan-occupied part of Kashmir with the Indian-occupied part and restore the old borders. You could have both India and Pakistan agreeing to guarantee those borders, demilitarise the area, and to invest in it economically. In a sane world that would happen but we don't live in a sane world.
 * Quoted in "Sir Salman Rushdie: Pakistan on the road to tyranny", BBC News, 18 September 2012.

 * '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. 'I stand with Charlie Hebdo, as we all must, to defend the art of satire, which has always been a force for liberty and against tyranny, dishonesty and stupidity. 'Respect for religion’ has become a code phrase meaning ‘fear of religion.’ Religions, like all other ideas, deserve criticism, satire, and, yes, our fearless disrespect.
 * Statement in The Wall Street Journal, Salman Rushdie: "I Stand With Charlie Hebdo, as We All Must" '' (7 January 2015)

 * It is clear that India has not behaved at all well in Kashmir; that the Indian military forces seem like, feel like and behave like an occupying army; that there are too many accusations of violence, rape, and murder for it all to be made up; and the Pakistani side has constantly exacerbated the situation by the use of jihadist groups, and by the funding of groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Muhammad and so on.
 * Quoted in "Sir Salman Rushdie: Pakistan on the road to tyranny", BBC News, 18 September 2012.

 * I have to say it has been alarming to see publishers looking to bowdlerise the work of such people as Roald Dahl and Ian Fleming [...] The idea that James Bond could be made politically correct is almost comical. I think that has to be resisted. Books have to come to us from their time and be of their time, and if that's difficult to take, don’t read them. Read another book, but don't try and remake yesterday's work in the light of today's attitudes.
 * The freedom to publish, of course, is also the freedom to read, the freedom to write what you want, to be able to choose what you want to read and not have it decided for you externally — and the freedom to publish books that ought to be published and sometimes are difficult to publish because of pressure from this or that group.
 * Speaking via video link from New York at the Freedom to Publish award at the British Book Awards (15 May 2023), as cited in "Salman Rushdie mocks 'comical' attempt to rewrite James Bond novels" The Times (16 May 2023)

The Hindu interview (2012)

 * Interviewed by Mukund Padmanabhan (published 6 October 2012; revised 18 October 2016).

 * There is no right in the world not to be offended. That right simply doesn't exist. In a free society, an open society, people have strong opinions, and these opinions very often clash. In a democracy, we have to learn to deal with this. And this is true about novels, it's true about cartoons, it's true about all these products.
 * A question I have often asked is, "What would an inoffensive political cartoon look like?" What would a respectful cartoon look like? The form requires disrespect and so if we are going to have in the world things like cartoons and satire, we just have to accept it as part of the price of freedom.
 * The mistake of the West was to put the Sauds on the throne of Saudi Arabia and give them control of the world's oil fortune, which they then used to propagate Wahhabi Islam. This very minor extremist cult, Wahhabism, was suddenly propagated across the Muslim world through madrassas and has created generations now who are steeped in this harsher, more paranoid, more confrontational version of Islam.

The Guardian interview (2021)

 * Interviewed in "Salman Rushdie: 'I am stupidly optimistic – it got me through those bad years'" by Hadley Freeman (published 15 May 2021).

 * [On the period immediately after the Iranian fatwa when Rushdie was in hiding.] I really resist the idea of being dragged back to that period of time that you insist on bringing up.
 * I'm not a geopolitical entity. I'm someone writing in a room.
 * One of the benefits of being a writer, I think, is that if what you're doing for a living is examining your life, hopefully by the time you reach this advanced age, you understand something about yourself and why you think what you think. Of course, other writers go in different directions.
 * I grew up in a very female world with three younger sisters, so I was always comfortable around women, which was one of the reasons I hated my boarding school [Rugby], because there were no girls or women there. I think a lot of men are scared of women, and if the women are competent, brilliant or self-assured, they become even scarier. But to me, that's enormously attractive. I can't dream of having as a friend, or anything else in my life, a woman who is not those things.
 * [Is there more support for censorship now?] I don't know if there's more of it, but it's certainly more obvious. There's a youthful progressive movement, much of which is extremely valuable, but there does seem to be within it an acceptance that certain ideas should be suppressed, and I just think that's worrying. Wherever there has been censorship, the first people to suffer from it are underprivileged minorities. So if in the name of underprivileged minorities you wish to endorse a suppression of wrongthink, it's a slippery slope.
 * I'll tell you quite truthfully that the great wound in my life [from then] is India, because of the way I and my work have been treated there

The New Yorker interview (2023)

 * Interviewed in "The Defiance of Salman Rushdie" by David Remnick (published 6 February 2023).

I hugely admire A Passage to India, because it was an anti-colonial book at a time when it was not at all fashionable to be anti-colonial [...] What I kind of rebelled against was Forsterian English, which is very cool and meticulous. I thought, If there's one thing that India is not, it's not cool. It's hot and noisy and crowded and excessive. How do you find a language that's like that?
 * [On meeting E.M. Forster on several occasions while an undergraduate at King's College, Cambridge] He was very encouraging when he heard that I wanted to be a writer [...] And he said something which I treasured, which is that he felt that the great novel of India would be written by somebody from India with a Western education.

 * [Since the fatwa of 1989, and not allowing it to affect his writings.] There was a moment when there was a 'me' floating around that had been invented to show what a bad person I was [...] "Evil." "Arrogant." "Terrible writer." "Nobody would've read him if there hadn't been an attack against his book." Et cetera. I've had to fight back against that false self. My mother used to say that her way of dealing with unhappiness was to forget it. She said, "Some people have a memory. I have a forget-ory."... If somebody arrives from another planet who has never heard of anything that happened to me, and just has the books on the shelf and reads them chronologically, I don't think that alien would think, Something terrible happened to this writer in 1989. The books go on their own journey. And that was really an act of will.

 * [Rushdie was stabbed in August 2022, leading to life-changing injuries, by an admirer of Ayatollah Khomeini. His novel, Victory City, was about to be published.] I'm hoping that to some degree it might change the subject. I've always thought that my books are more interesting than my life [...] Unfortunately, the world appears to disagree.

 * I'm going to tell you really truthfully, I'm not thinking about the long term [...] I'm thinking about little step by little step. I just think, Bop till you drop.

 * I've got nothing else to do. I would like to have a second skill, but I don't. I always envied writers like Günter Grass, who had a second career as a visual artist. I thought how nice it must be to spend a day wrestling with words, and then get up and walk down the street to your art studio and become something completely else. I don't have that. So, all I can do is this. As long as there's a story that I think is worth giving my time to, then I will. When I have a book in my head, it's as if the rest of the world is in its correct shape.

2024–present

 * Just wondering if the Royal Society of Literature is "impartial" about attempted murder, @BernardineEvari? (Asking for a friend.)
 * Tweet/X post (8 February 2024), as cited in "Salman Rushdie: Is writers’ society 'impartial' on attempted murder?", The Times (9 February 2024).
 * At this time, Bernardine Evaristo was president of the Royal Society of Literature. The RSL "cannot take sides in writers' controversies and issues," Evaristo had written in The Guardian, it "must remain impartial", although Evaristo and the RSL responded with posts on X indicating her comment in the article was not about Rushdie.

Quotes about Rushdie

 * In alphabetical order by author or source.

 * [Y]ou will find elements of magic realism in literature from all over the world—not just in Latin America. You will find it in Scandinavian sagas, in African poetry, in Indian literature written in English, in American literature written by ethnic minorities. Writers like Salman Rushdie, Toni Morrison, Barbara Kingsolver, and Alice Hoffman all use this style.
 * Isabel Allende Interview

 * If a blasphemer [Rushdie] can be given the title "Sir" by the West despite the fact he has hurt the feelings of Muslims, then a mujahid [Osama bin Laden] who has been fighting for Islam against the Russians, Americans and British must be given the lofty title of Islam, Saifullah.
 * Tahir Ashrafi, Pakistan Ulema Council chairman, quoted in Bin Laden made a Sword of Islam, Metro.co.uk (21 June 2007)

 * Rushdie shows us with what fantasy our sort of history must now be written — if, that is, we are to penetrate it, and perhaps even save it.
 * Malcolm Bradbury "Rushdie's modern history", The Guardian (8 September 1983), p. 14
 * From a review of the novel Shame.

 * 'I never thought of myself as a writer about religion until religion came after me', Salman Rushdie says. 'Religion was part of my subject, of course... nevertheless... I had to confront what was confronting me and to decide what I wanted to stand up for in the face of what so vociferously, repressively and violently stood against me. At that time it was difficult to persuade people that the attack on The Satanic Verses was part of a broader global assault on writers, artists, and fundamental freedoms."
 * Nadine Gordimer "Faith, Reason and War" (2006)

 * In the face of this ukase, which amounts to a life sentence as well as a death sentence on a reflective, autonomous individual, no wonder that people change the subject and take refuge in precedent or analogy. It's natural to do so when faced with a challenge that is so alarmingly singular. Yes, there are other death squads and assassins and proscriptions and archipelagos and all the rest of it. Yes, there are existing campaigns devoted to the release of so-and-so and the freedom of this-and-that. But when last did a head of government claim to be soliciting the murder of a citizen of another country, for pay, for the offence of literary production? I have heard great argument about it and about, from reminiscences of the Trotsky assassination to Christopher Hill's recall of the Papal incitement against Gloriana, but evermore came out by the same door as in I went. The Salman Rushdie case has no analogue and no precedent.
 * Christopher Hitchens "Siding with Rushdie" London Review of Books 11:20 (October 26, 1989)

An August 19 New York City rally of writers gathered in support of Rushdie reprised a 1989 demonstration against the fatwa in which Susan Sontag, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, Christopher Hitchens, and others participated, but the later iteration "paled in comparison," a Le Monde editorial remarked. Across social media, writers expressed concern for Rushdie's health, but an instinctual solidarity with him and the sense—so strong at the time of the fatwa—that his fate spoke to all of us as members of a liberal society did not materialize. Even among his defenders, free speech took a back seat. Why? One reason is fear. In 2009, the British writer Hanif Kureishi told Prospect Magazine that "nobody would have the balls today to write The Satanic Verses." He might have added that no one would have the balls to defend it. Most writers, Kureishi continued, live quietly, and "they don’t want a bomb in the letterbox."
 * [Published six-months after the near-fatal stabbing of Rushdie in August 2022] As it happens, he had cause to worry. In the intervening years, support for Rushdie and for free expression has narrowed ...
 * Russell Jacoby "A Climate of Fear: The Free Speech Skeptics Abandon Salman Rushdie" Harper's Magazine (March 2023)
 * Kureishi was speaking a few years after the Danish Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy led to worldwide protests in late January and early February 2006 leading to several hundred deaths and an international diplomatic crisis for Denmark.

 * Salman Rushdie, the author of the book Satanic Verses, must be executed on the basis of the religious fatwa by His Eminence Imam Khomeini. He has no escape from this fatwa.
 * Mohammad Khatami, Kayhan, (7 March 1989)

 * I would like to inform all the intrepid Muslims in the world... that the author of the book titled The Satanic Verses, which has been compiled, printed, and published in opposition to Islam, the Prophet, and the Koran, as well as those publishers who were aware of its contents, have been declared madhur el dam [“those whose blood must be shed”]. I call on all zealous Muslims to execute them quickly, wherever they find them, so that no one will dare to insult Islam again....
 * Imam Khomeini, Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa against Salman Rushdie read on Iran's state radio on (14 February 1989) CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS FOUNDATION

 * I admire Salman Rushdie enormously. Before Midnight's Children, writers of Indian origin writing in English were encouraged by convention to write of their world with detachment and irony. Their method was reductive. They treated their characters as though they were uncomplicated. With Midnight's Children, Rushdie breaks down those conventions. He aggrandizes, and that's marvellously healthy. The sections on Bombay have a superb excess of energy. Many of the writers before him tried, very unfortunately, to "tame" India for foreign readers. The other interesting thing about Salman Rushdie is that he discards British models. His fiction is closer to that of Günter Grass and Márquez than to Forster.
 * 1987 interview in Conversations with Bharati Mukherjee Edited by Bradley C. Edwards (2009)

As writers and scholars from the Islamic world we are appalled by the vilification, bookbanning and threats of physical violence against Salman Rushdie, the gifted author of Midnight's Children, Shame, and The Satanic Verses. This campaign is done in the name of Islam, although none of it does Islam any credit. Certainly Muslims and others are entitled to protest against The Satanic Verses if they feel the novel offends their religion and cultural sensibilities. But to carry protest and debate over into the realm of bigoted violence is in fact antithetical to Islamic traditions of learning and tolerance. We deplore and regret this sort of thing, and we reaffirm our belief in universal principles of rational discussion and freedom of expression.
 * To the Editors:
 * Joint letter from Edward W. Said [Columbia University]; Aga Shahid Ali [Hamilton College]; Ibrahim Abu-Lughod [Northwestern University]; Akeel Bilgrami [Columbia University]; Eqbal Ahmad [Hampshire College] published in The New York Review of Books (March 16, 1989)
 * The order of signatories is from the heading of the article, but the list order (with academic affiliations) is different at the end.

 * I asked him, "How did you manage to keep on writing when writing demands self-abandonment, when you’re being hunted, you're being persecuted?” He said, "You should tell them, 'Fuck you.'" And I said, "Did you know how to say 'fuck you' before it all occurred?" And he said, "No, I didn't know." So I said, "This turmoil taught you to detach and to be able to say 'fuck you' and keep on writing?" And he said, "Yes, this is what you have to learn from this experience."
 * Dorit Rabinyan Interview (2019)

 * I think when you are Salman Rushdie, you must get bored with people who always want to talk to you about literature.
 * Riya Sen, in "As Salman Rushdie steps out with another beautiful woman... just how DOES he do it?" in The Evening Star (21 July 2008)

 * In Islam there is a line between let's say freedom and the line which is then transgressed into immorality and irresponsibility and I think as far as this writer is concerned, unfortunately, he has been irresponsible with his freedom of speech. Salman Rushdie or indeed any writer who abuses the prophet, or indeed any prophet, under Islamic law, the sentence for that is actually death. It's got to be seen as a deterrent, so that other people should not commit the same mistake again.
 * Cat Stevens (Yusuf Islam), as quoted in "Yussuf Islam, Formerly Cat Stevens, Expresses Support For Rushdie Death Sentence" in The Christian Science Monitor (1989)

 * I never called for the death of Salman Rushdie; nor backed the Fatwa issued by the Ayatollah Khomeini — and still don't. The book itself destroyed the harmony between peoples and created an unnecessary international crisis. When asked about my opinion regarding blasphemy, I could not tell a lie and confirmed that — like both the Torah and the Gospel — the Qur'an considers it, without repentance, as a capital offense. The Bible is full of similar harsh laws if you're looking for them. However, the application of such Biblical and Qur'anic injunctions is not to be outside of due process of law, in a place or land where such law is accepted and applied by the society as a whole.
 * Cat Stevens (Yusuf Islam), in "Chinese Whiskers," FAQ #18: "Did Cat Stevens Say, ‘Kill Rushdie!’?," Mountain of Light (undated)

 * Almost all Muslims, including the most enlightened, feel offended by Rushdie's novel or, rather, by reports they have read or heard about it. Very few people have actually read the dense and tortuous book, but they do not have to. The very idea of using the prophet Muhammad as a character in a novel is painful to many Muslims. The entire Islamic system consists of the so-called Hodud, or limits beyond which one should simply not venture. Islam does not recognize unlimited freedom of expression. Call them taboos, if you like, but Islam considers a wide variety of topics as permanently closed. Most Muslims are prepared to be broad-minded about most things but never anything that even remotely touches their faith... To Muslims religion is not just a part of life. It is, in fact, life that is a part of religion. Muslims cannot understand a concept that has no rules, no limits. The Western belief in human rights, which seems to lack limits, is alien to Islamic traditions... The fact that Rushdie propagated his heresy in a book is of especial significance to Muslims. Islam is the religion of the book par excellence. Few cultures hold the written and printed word in so much awe as Muslims, even though the vast majority are illiterate. When a Muslim wants to clinch an argument he says, 'It is written.'
 * Amir Taheri, "Khomeini's Scapegoat", The Times, London (February 13, 1989)

title: Salman Rushdie


text:
The Ground Beneath Her Feet

The Ground Beneath Her Feet, a 1999 book by Salman Rushdie, is his sixth novel. Published in 1999, it is a variation on the Orpheus/Eurydice myth with rock music replacing Orpheus' lyre. The myth works as a red thread from which the author sometimes strays, but to which he attaches an endless series of references.

Quotes

 * "The only people who see the whole picture are the ones who step out of the frame."
 * Source: Chapter 2, "Melodies and Silences"

 * "Between the self and the other, between the visionary and the psychopath, between the lover and his love, between the overworld and the underworld, falls the shadow."
 * Source: Chapter 5, "Goat Songs"

 * "The concert was over, the crowd was drifting away, but I stood rooted to the spot, taking photographs. The world was cracking. Ormus and Vina were deep in conversation with the musicians, who were packing up their instruments and shouting at the local stagehands to watch what they were doing. My heart was breaking. While Ormus and Vina chatted to the jazzmen, their hands and bodies were talking to each other. Click, click. I can see you, you two. Click. Peekaboo! Do you know I'm doing this? Are you letting me watch, is that it, even though I'm getting the goods on you, in here, in my little German box of wonders? You don't care any more, is that it? You want it all out in the open. Click. And what about me, Vina? I'll grow up too. He waited for you. Why wouldn't you wait for me? I want to be in that number!"
 * Source: Chapter 6, "Disorientations"

 * "Death is more than love or is it. Art is more than love or is it. Love is more than death and art, or not. This is the subject. This is the subject. This is it."
 * Source: Chapter 7, "More than love"

 * "We have been here before. This is a helicopter, hovering just above the broken ground. This is the woman I love, calling to me through the open door. I'm going, then. And I'm shouting back, I can't go. What? Go. Fuck you. What? Goodbye, Hope.  And this is what people are saying when they aren't saying what they mean.  I'm going, then. (Come with me, please, I need you, I can't believe you won't come with me.) I can't go. (My darling, I want never to let you out of my sight again, but goddamn it, you kick me around, you know that?, do you want the see the bruises?, and just this once I'm not putting you first. I'll be there soon enough, this time you can wait for me. If you want me, you'll wait. That's right, a test. Yeah. Maybe it really is.) What? (You bastard?, you think you can hold out on me? Oh Jesus, Rai, don't play games, not now, not today.) Go. (Okay, no games. I love you forever and beyond. But this is my work. I'll be there sooner than blinking. Go. I'm right behind you. I love you. Go.)  Fuck you (I never wanted you to come to Mexico in the first place fuck you but you came anyway fuck you I guess that proves something yeah but I hurt you anyway I was mad I was wrong fuck you and then you helped me fuck you that really churned me up fuck you so I trusted you I really trusted you fuck you then the earth moved and you abandoned me fuck you you took your photographs I could have been dying I could have been broken and dying but you had your work to do fuck you and now you won't come with me fuck you now when I finally worked out that I need you fuck you I want you fuck you maybe I love you I do love you fuck you Rai I love you fuck you. I do.)  What? (What???)  Goodbye, Hope. (Goodbye for a moment, you bastard, but after this I'm never letting you out of my sight. The next time I see you will be the beginning of the rest of our lives.)  Every night for years, I replayed that shouted dialogue in my head, and now I think this may be what it means. Maybe Goodbye really was the never-to-be-completed beginning of Hello. I hope so, I hope so. Even though it's a meaning that makes the loss weigh more heavily and the pain harder to bear."
 * Source: Chapter 16, "Beneath Her Feet"

 * "Falling in love with Vina, I knew I was stepping out of my league. Nevertheless, I took the step and did not fall on my face. This is human heroism. Of this, as of little else, I am proud. Male love is a kind of self-assessment. We allow ourselves to love only those women whom we feel we have a right to pay court, to whom we dare aspire."
 * Source: Chapter 16, "Vina Divina"

 * "When you have no picture of the world, you don't know how to make choices -- material, inconsequential or moral. You don't know which way is up, or if you're coming or going, or how many beans make five."
 * Source: Chapter 16, "Vina Divina"

 * "Earthquakes, scientists say, are common phenomena. Globally speaking there are around fifteen thousand tremors a decade. Stability is what's rare. The abnormal, the extreme, the operatic, the unnatural: these rule. There is no such thing as normal life. Yet the everyday is what we need, it's the house we build to defend us against the big bad wolf of change. If, finally, the wolf is reality, the house is our best defense against the storm: call it civilization. We build our walls of straw or brick not only against the vulpine instability of the times but against our own predatory natures too; against the wolf within."
 * Source: Chapter 16, "Vina Divina"

 * "I barely knew them -- they were aliens, after all, visitors from a familiar-sounding elsewhere, slipping into our awareness by an unimaginable route -- and yet I'm profoundly stirred by their loss. I'm trying to work out why that is. In the end I decide it's because although I, we, didn't really know them, they knew us, and whenever someone who knows you disappears, you lose one version of yourself. Yourself as you were seen, as you were judged to be. Lover or enemy, mother or friend, those who know us construct us, and their several knowings slant the different facets of our characters like diamond-cutter's tools. Each such loss is a step leading to the grave, where all versions blend and end."
 * Source: Chapter 16, "Vina Divina"

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: The Ground Beneath Her Feet


text:
The Sorrows of Young Werther

Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther) (1774) by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Quotes

 * Gewiss, du hast recht, Bester, der Schmerzen wären minder unter den Menschen, wenn sie nicht - Gott weiss, warum sie so gemacht sind - mit so viel Emsigkeit der Einbildungskraft sich beschäftigten, die Erinnerungen des vergangenen Übels zurückzurufen, eher als eine gleichgültige Gegenwart zu ertragen.
 * No doubt you are right, my best of friends, there would be far less suffering amongst mankind, if men—and God knows why they are so fashioned—did not employ their imaginations so assiduously in recalling the memory of past sorrow, instead of bearing their present lot with equanimity.
 * 4 May 1771

 * Und ich habe, mein Lieber, wieder bei diesem kleinen Geschäft gefunden, dass Missverständnisse und Trägheit vielleicht mehr Irrungen in der Welt machen als List und Bosheit. Wenigstens sind die beiden letzteren gewiss seltener.
 * And I have again observed, my dear friend, in this trifling affair, that misunderstandings and neglect occasion more mischief in the world than even malice and wickedness. At all events, the two latter are of less frequent occurrence.
 * And again I have found, handling this trifling piece of business, that misunderstandings and neglect create more confusion in this world than trickery and malice. At any rate, the last two are certainly much less frequent.
 * 4 May 1771

 * [...] dann sehne ich mich oft und denke : ach könntest du das wieder ausdrücken, könntest du dem Papiere das einhauchen, was so voll, so warm in dir lebt, daß es würde der Spiegel deiner Seele, wie deine Seele ist der Spiegel des unendlichen Gottes!
 * I often think with longing, Oh, would I could describe these conceptions, could impress upon paper all that is living so full and warm within me, that it might be the mirror of my soul, as my soul is the mirror of the infinite God!
 * 10 May 1771

 * Ich weiß wohl, daß wir nicht gleich sind noch sein können; aber ich halte dafür, daß der, der nötig zu haben glaubt, vom sogenannten Pöbel sich zu entfernen, um den Respekt zu erhalten, ebenso tadelhaft ist als ein Feiger, der sich vor seinem Feinde verbirgt, weil er zu unterliegen fürchtet.
 * I know very well that we are not all equal, nor can be so; but it is my opinion that he who deems it important to keep aloof from the so-called rabble in order to maintain their respect is as culpable as a coward who hides himself from his enemy because he fears defeat.
 * 15 May 1771

 * Wenn du fragst, wie die Leute hier sind, muß ich dir sagen: wie überall!
 * If you inquire what the people are like here, I must answer, «The same as everywhere.»
 * 17 May 1771

 * Es ist ein einförmiges Ding um das Menschengeschlecht. Die meisten verarbeiten den größten Teil der Zeit, um zu leben, und das bisschen, das ihnen von Freiheit übrig bleibt, ängstigt sie so, dass sie alle Mittel aufsuchen, um es los zu werden.
 * The human race is but a monotonous affair. Most of them labor the greater part of their time for mere subsistence; and the scanty portion of freedom which remains to them so troubles them that they use every exertion to get rid of it.
 * 17 May 1771

 * Ich habe das Herz gefühlt, die große Seele, in deren Gegenwart ich mir schien mehr zu sein, als ich war, weil ich alles war, was ich sein konnte.
 * I have possessed that heart, that noble soul, in whose presence I seemed to be more than I really was, because I was all that I could be.
 * 17 May 1771

 * Daß die Kinder nicht wissen, warum sie wollen, darin sind alle hochgelahrten Schul- und Hofmeister einig; daß aber auch Erwachsene gleich Kindern auf diesem Erdboden herumtaumeln und wie jene nicht wissen, woher sie kommen und wohin sie gehen, ebensowenig nach wahren Zwecken handeln, ebenso durch Biskuit und Kuchen und Birkenreiser regiert werden: das will niemand gern glauben, und mich dünkt, man kann es mit Händen greifen.
 * That children don't know why they want what they want, all learned teachers and judges are unanimous. But that adults, just like children, tumble about in the world without knowing where they come from and where they're going—that they act in accordance with their avowed aims just as little as children do—that they can be ruled by cookies and cakes and lashes just as easily as children—this no one wants to believe, although it seems to me so palpably true.
 * 22 May 1771

 * I am indeed but a wanderer, a pilgrim on earth. But are you anything more?
 * June 16 1771

 * Ein Mensch, der um anderer willen, ohne dass es seine eigene Leidenschaft, sein eigenes Bedürfnis ist, sich um Geld oder Ehre oder sonst etwas abarbeitet, ist immer ein Tor.
 * The man who, solely from regard to the opinion of others, and without any wish or necessity of his own, toils after gold, honour, or any other phantom, is no better than a fool.
 * 19 July 1771

 * Ich bin mehr als einmal trunken gewesen, meine Leidenschaften waren nie weit vom Wahnsinn, und beides reut mich nicht: denn ich habe in meinem Maße begreifen lernen, wie man alle außerordentlichen Menschen, die etwas Großes, etwas Unmöglichscheinendes wirkten, von jeher für Trunkene und Wahnsinnige ausschreien musste.
 * I have been more than once intoxicated, my passions have always bordered on extravagance: I am not ashamed to confess it; for I have learned, by my own experience, that all extraordinary men, who have accomplished great and astonishing actions, have ever been decried by the world as drunken or insane.
 * 12 August 1771

 * Lieber Freund, wenn nur das Kleinod nicht eben so zerbrechlich wäre, als es schön und kostbar ist.
 * If only, dear friend, these precious treasures, beautiful and priceless as they are, were not so fragile too.
 * If only these treasures were not so fragile as they are precious and beautiful.
 * 17 February 1772

About

 * Don’t know whether it's history or poetry. It is all very natural, and has a way of drawing the tears from one's head right movingly. Well, love is a strange thing! It will not be played with like a bird. I know it, how it goes through body and life, and beats and rages in every vein, and plays tricks with the head and reason. Poor Werther! He had else such fine conceits and thoughts. Had he but taken a journey to Paris or to Pekin! But no! He would not leave the fire and the spit, and went round and round it till he went to pieces. And there's the misery, that one can have such talents and gifts, and yet be so weak. Therefore they ought to make a turf-seat by his grave under the Linden-tree by the church-yard wall, that one might sit down upon it and lay his head in his hand, and weep over human weakness. But when thou hast finished weeping, good gentle youth! when thou hast finished weeping, lift up thy head with joy, and place thy hand against thy side! For there is such a thing as Virtue. That too goes through body and life, and beats and rages in every vein. She is said not to be attainable without much earnestness and conflict, and therefore not to be much known or loved. But he who has her has a rich reward in sunshine and frost and rain, and when Friend Hain comes with his scythe.
 * Matthias Claudius On Sorrows of Young Werther, Prose writers of Germany, by Frederic Henry Hedge, p. 183-184 Published 1870

title: The Sorrows of Young Werther


text:
Wikiquote talk:Sourced and Unsourced sections

/Archive 1

Update
Updated the page, to reflect current practices. . Cirt (talk) 19:29, 16 October 2009 (UTC)

Sourced, attributed, unsourced, and misattributed.
I'm trying to align Sourced and Unsourced sections, Sourcing, Quotability, and Guide_to_layout. Please comment on whether this is the correct Wikiquote classification and treatment of quotes: (1) sourced to author's work (appears without qualification), (2) sourced to reputable secondary publication but not to author's work (appears as "attributed" in article), (3) generally attributed but not sourced to author's work or reputable secondary publication (appears as "unsourced" on discussion page), and (4) generally attributed but sourced to another author (appears as "misattributed" in non-author's article). Butwhatdoiknow (talk) 16:07, 24 September 2020 (UTC)


text:
Talk:The God of Small Things

The edition of the book which has been used to quote from should be given, so that you can estimate the validity of page numbers, because page numbers differ from version to version 80.143.246.58 16:32, 6 Feb 2004 (UTC)

 * I agree that editions should be given when page numbers are used. I personally tend to avoid designating page numbers, and feel chapters or sections are usually sufficient, and even they are not usually necessary. —Kalki

 * Okay. Will cease and desist in the Page Number dept then =). Gaurav 09:51, 9 Feb 2004 (UTC)

 * I feel that the page numbers are invaluable to anyone and everyone reading this article. There is no reason not to include them.

 * Even if you include the edition of the book so page numbers correlate, who is going to rush out and find that edition. Better to give chapter and section reference, I think :) Vaisnavi

title: Talk:The God of Small Things


text:
Talk:Leaves of Grass

Why do you use uppercase headlines? In my opinion this looks very unaesthetic and should only be used in ascii text files where it is not possible to mark headlines with the aid of formatting so you have to rely on uppercase. Due to the fact that formatting is available it does not make sense. Maybe you copied the headlines from an ascii file and didn't felt like doing a rewrite. If this is so then I would agree to rewrite them. 80.143.246.58 21:06, 6 Feb 2004 (UTC)

 * I haven't worked on Leaves of Grass in a while, but I believe I used uppercase because that was the way it was formatted in the editions I was using as reference. —Kalki 21:28, 6 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Picture of family?
Is this seriously necessary? 71.234.181.121 02:48, 1 December 2006 (UTC)
 * No images at all are "necessary" but I believe most people find images make a page more interesting. ~ Kalki 20:44, 2 June 2007 (UTC)

Added more images
The boldly celebratory tone of Leaves of Grass has long made it one of my favorite works of the world's literature, and I am glad I've taken some time to add more images to the article. Though it might take more time to load with slower connections, I believe the visual augmentation of many the ideas presented on the page is worth it.

The last few days I actually spent almost all of my available time working on the article, first posting a very preliminary edit before leaving home, and then on returning I worked much of the next day entirely with a text copy of the file on my computer, and only after much idea gathering began doing "trial edits" using the "preview" function as a guide as to seeing what available images seemed to fit together best.

The first day I added many ideas to the basic file, sometimes having as many as 8 images in consideration at once for the same caption, and the same image as a candidate for several captions. I continued to add many more the second day, and then using previews to gradually winnow most of these out, had most of the existing structure established. There were some ideas that I thought very good but eventually abandoned, and a few points where I continued to find deficiencies, or to get better ideas as I went along.

As the page was no longer linked as a "QOTD" page, the urgency of my efforts diminished, and this last day of editing was more of an exhaustive search for ways of improving the presentation in a few relatively minor ways, and extensive experimentation with minor format tweaks. In all I probably made hundreds of versions over the last few days, and made dozens of "preview" edits. I might review the page and make a few minor tweaks in the weeks to come, but am moving on primarily to other things now. The last image I actually added to the page was the final one of grass, added to the file I'd been working on just a few minutes ago:

I had meant to get around to adding many sourced quotations to the Carl von Clausewitz page yesterday, while it was a QOTD page, but the time spent trying to finish up on this one prevented that. It will probably now be one of next articles I work on extensively, but it might be several days or more before I post anything to it. ~ Kalki 20:44, 2 June 2007 (UTC)

title: Talk:Leaves of Grass


text:
Whale Rider

Whale Rider [Maori title: Te Kaieke Tohora] is a 2002 film based on the book The Whale Rider by Witi Ihimaera. It is about the struggles of a Maori girl, Paikea, to succeed her grandfather as leader of her tribe in spite of tradition dictating that the chief be male.
 * Written and directed by Niki Caro.

One young girl dared to confront the past, change the present and determine the future.

Paikea

 * In the old days the land felt a great emptiness. It was waiting waiting. Waiting to be filled up. Waiting for someone to love it. Waiting for a leader. And he came on the back of a whale, the man to Iead a new peopIe. Our ancestor Paikea.
 * My name is Paikea Apirana, and I come from a long line of chiefs...
 * There was no gladness when I was born.
 * By being born I broke the line back to the ancient ones. It wasn't anybody's fault — it just happened.
 * My Koro wished in his heart that I'd never been born. But he changed his mind.
 * Why doesn't he want me?
 * We can learn — and if the knowledge is given to everyone — then we can have lots of leaders, and soon everyone will be strong — not just the ones that have been chosen — because sometimes even if you're the leader and you need to be strong — you can get tired…
 * I wasn't scared to die. Why though ?
 * My name is Paikea Apirana and I come from a Iong Iine of chiefs stretching all the way back to the whale rider. I'm not a prophet, but I know that our peopIe will keep going forward all together, with all of our strength.

Koro

 * When you extend your tongue...you're saying to your enemies.....I'm gonna eat you...your eyes will roll back...your head will be stuck on the end of my stick. FeeI the ihi...the power. Make them feeI the wehi...the fear. I want the hairs on the backs of their necks to stand up.
 * Wise leader, forgive me. I am but a fledgling new to flight.

Dialogue

 * Porourangi: Koro is just...he's just Iooking for something that doesn't exist anymore.
 * Pai: A new leader? They exist.
 * Porourangi: Yeah, they do, except I think it's become even more than that. In his head, your Koro, he needs a prophet.
 * Pai: What's that?
 * Porourangi: Well, somebody who's gonna Iead our peopIe out of the darkness and who'll make everything aIright again. OnIy probIem is you can't just decide who those peopIe are just because you want them to be, eh?

 * Koro: You're going to Iearn that chant, all of you, Iearn it exactIy. And if you break the chant, you will suffer the utu. The consequences.
 * Hemi: Like what? Someone dying or something?
 * Koro: Like your dick'll drop off. So hold onto your dicks.

Taglines

 * One young girl dared to confront the past, change the present and determine the future.
 * In the ways of the Ancients, she found a hope for the future.

Cast

 * Keisha Castle-Hughes - Paikea "Pai" Apirana
 * Rawiri Paratene - Koro Apirana
 * Vicky Haughton - Nani Flowers Apirana
 * Cliff Curtis - Porourangi Apirana
 * Grant Roa - Uncle Rawiri Apirana

title: Whale Rider


text:
User:131.202.149.170

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Ankur

title: User:131.202.149.170


text:
User:Ankur~enwikiquote

 * 1) REDIRECT http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Ankur

title: User:Ankur~enwikiquote


text:
Artist

An  is a person engaged in one or more of any of a broad spectrum of activities related to creating art, practicing the arts, and/or demonstrating an art.

 * CONTENT : A - F, G - L , M - R , S - Z , See also , External links

Quotes

 * Quotes are arranged alphabetically by author

A - F

 * In a way, artists are messengers between worlds, bringing ideas and symbols from one to the other.
 * Kathleen Alcalá "The Madonna in Cyberspace" (2000) in The Desert Remembers My Name: On Family and Writing (2007)

 * That's what we do as artists: we collect, we connect, we serve as scribes for the collective culture, and as messengers between worlds. Most important, we bring these symbols to the public. This is our gift, our regalo, our ofrenda. But it's up to the reader, the viewer, the listener, to bring out the power of these stories, to call out their names, and give them a place in the world.
 * Kathleen Alcalá "The Madonna in Cyberspace" (2000) in The Desert Remembers My Name: On Family and Writing (2007)

 * All great artists draw from the same resource: the human heart, which tells us all that we are more alike than we are unalike.
 * Maya Angelou Letter to My Daughter (2009)

 * One writes out of one thing only — one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.
 * James Baldwin "Autobiographical Notes" (1952); republished in Notes of a Native Son (1955)

 * Only if we face these open wounds in ourselves can we understand them in other people. An artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian. His role is to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are. He has to tell, because nobody else can tell, what it is like to be alive.
 * James Baldwin quoted in "Doom and glory of knowing who you are" by Jane Howard, in LIFE magazine, Vol. 54, No. 21 (24 May 1963), p. 89

 * Being an artist is about creative freedom. I want to save the world and that's why social commentary is always present in my work. It's easy to live with your eyes shut but that's not fulfilling or helpful to the world.
 * Bambi, "Bambi: graffiti artist on why she's more than just a 'female Banksy’," in : the guardian, Oct. 18, 2015.

 * “He is difficult to work with, like every real artist, but certainly fond of money—” “Like every real artist. I believe I see your point.”
 * John Barnes, The Lost Princess Man (2009) in Gardner Dozois & Jonathan Strahan (eds.) The New Space Opera 2 (mass market paperback edition, ISBN 978-0-06-156236-5), p. 142

 * A writer — and, I believe, generally all persons — must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.
 * Jorge Luis Borges, Twenty Conversations with Borges, Including a Selection of Poems : Interviews by Roberto Alifano, 1981–1983 (1984).

 * Artists shouldn't be made famous.
 * Kate Bush, Profiles in Rock interview (December 1980).

 * An artist is a man of action, whether he creates a personality, invents an expedient, or finds the issue of a complicated situation.
 * Joseph Conrad, The Mirror of the Sea Ch. 9 (1906)

 * In order for the artist to have a world to express he must first be situated in this world, oppressed or oppressing, resigned or rebellious, a man among men.
 * Simone de Beauvoir, Part III: The Positive Aspect of Ambiguity

 * Art is the complement of science. Science as I have said is concerned wholly with relations, not with individuals. Art, on the other hand, is not only the disclosure of the individuality of the artist but also a manifestation of individuality as creative of the future, in an unprecedented response to conditions as they were in the past. Some artists in their vision of what might be but is not, have been conscious rebels. But conscious protest and revolt is not the form which the labor of the artist in creation of the future must necessarily take. Discontent with things as they are is normally the expression of the vision of what may be and is not, art in being the manifestation of individuality is this prophetic vision.
 * John Dewey, Time and Individuality (1940).

 * If I were asked to saywhat distinguishes an artistic temperament from any other, I'd say that it's a fundamental sense that the project of being aliveis something peculiar, little understood.
 * Mark Doty, The Art of Description, 2010

 * Let us consider two important factors, the two poles of the creation of art: the artist on one hand, and on the other the spectator who later becomes the posterity; to all appearances the artist acts like a mediumistic being who, from the labyrinth beyond time and space, seeks his way out to a clearing.
 * Marcel Duchamp, 'The Creative Act', 1957, Duchamp's lecture in Houston, April 1957, in Art News, 56. no. 4, Summer 1957, p. 28 –29

 * "Just picture it to yourself," he would explain. "From the depths of the universe, millions of eyes are looking down, and what do they see? A dull, monochrome grey mass crawling and crawling over the earth, then suddenly, like a pistol shot — a bright red blob! That's me going outside."
 * Yury Dombrovsky, The Faculty of Useless Knowledge (1975, tr. Alan Myers); words attributed to the artist Sergey Kalmykov

 * Great artists are people who find the way to be themselves in their art. Any sort of pretension induces mediocrity in art and life alike.
 * Margot Fonteyn, in Margot Fonteyn : Autobiography (1975), p. 81

G - L

 * I have come to the conclusion that a work of art restricted to what the artist has put in it is only a part of itself. It only attains full stature with what people and time make of it. It involves the whole complex of human relation to life. It is a mode of thinking, acting, perceiving and living.
 * Naum Gabo (1937) in a letter to Herbert Read. Cited in: Cyril Connolly (1944) Horizon: a review of literature and art. Vol 9-10. p. 58

 * [T]he entrepreneur is the focal point at which the dynamic forces... materialize into action for economic progress. The entrepreneur doesn't really respond primarily to the profit motive... entrepreneur and investor—are often not... the same person. Neither does the entrepreneur seek power... management and entrepreneur are not necessarily one. Nor do Veblenesque social status or Weberian Protestant righteousness seem to be the main motives... Rather, he seems to be the adventurer, a pioneer, an artist sculpting in economic clay. ...Is the dynamic force that sustains the industrialized economic system... an irrational spirit..? Many economists... postulate the existence of an "economic man," who rationally and objectively computes... and makes a decision that will maximize profits. ...[T]his imaginary construct is the dynamic implicitly assumed for almost all of the economic theories from the late 1800s to the present. ...[T]hey continue to use it because without economic man most of their theories would be invalidated.
 * Martin Gerhard Giesbrecht, The Evolution of Economic Society: An Introduction to Economics (1972) Ch. 7, The Arrival of Modern Economies and Economics, pp. 190-191.

 * The studio, a room to which the artist consigns himself for life, is naturally important, not only as workplace, but as a source of inspiration. And it usually manages, one way or another, to turn up in his product.
 * , The New York Times (29 June 1984).

 * I’ve been blessed to know a lot of artists who are also mothers, who don’t necessarily go the cliché route of “motherhood ruins you.” It has always been more nuanced conversations, about the joy found in some aspects of parenting, how this perspective does and doesn’t inform creative life, and how one has a full community life as an artist even if one isn’t as a mother.
 * Kaitlyn Greenidge Interview (2021)

 * The name of Leonardo da Vinci will be invoked by artists to prove that only a great artist can be a great technician. The name of Leonardo da Vinci will be invoked by technicians to prove that only a great technician can be a great artist.
 * , East Village Other (1968).

 * The Joker I now do what other people only dream. I make art until someone dies. See? I am the world's first fully functioning homicidal artist.
 * and, Batman (1989), interpreted by as The Joker; Cited in: Jöel Black, The Aesthetics of Murder: : A Study in Romantic Literature and Contemporary Culture. 1991. p. 12
 * This is precisely what is decisive in Nietzsche’s conception of art, that he sees it in its essential entirety in terms of the artist; this he does consciously and in explicit opposition to that conception of art which represents it in terms of those who “enjoy” and “experience” it. That is a guiding principle of Nietzsche's teaching on art: art must be grasped in terms of creators and producers, not recipients. Nietzsche expresses it unequivocally in the following words (WM, 811): “Our aesthetics heretofore has been a woman’s aesthetics, inasmuch as only the recipients of art have formulated their experiences of ‘what is beautiful.’ In all philosophy to date the artist is missing.” Philosophy of art means “aesthetics” for Nietzsche too—but masculine aesthetics, not feminine aesthetics. The question of art is the question of the artist as the productive, creative one; his experiences of what is beautiful must provide the standard.
 * Heidegger, Nietzsche (1961), p. 70.

 * If we are to change our world view, images have to change. The artist now has a very important job to do. He's not a little peripheral figure entertaining rich people, he's really needed.
 * David Hockney Interview with Paul Joyce, New York, (September 1986) quoted in Hockney on Photography, ed. Wendy Brown (1988).

 * Artists have themes that they go back to—that they are haunted by and obsessed with.
 * Alice Hoffman Interview with Goodreads (2009)

 * I hope when artists write new characters, we invent new archetypes and they are visions of ways that we can be...What we need to do is to be able to imagine the possibility of a playful, peaceful, nurturing, mothering man, and we need to imagine the possibilities of a powerful, nonviolent woman and the possibilities of harmonious communities and if we can just imagine them, that would be the first step toward building them and becoming them.
 * 1990 interview in Conversations with Maxine Hong Kingston (1998)

 * The artist tries to see what there is to be interested in... He has not created something, he has seen something.
 * T. E. Hulme, Speculations (1924).

 * My job is to help the world..That is what an artist's job is—to the degree that we can. That is nothing more than holding up a mirror and saying, 'You're beautiful, baby.' Or holding up a mirror and saying, 'Look at the shit that you're doing to yourself. Maybe you should stop.' It is an artist's job to speak truth to power.
 * N.K. Jemisin in "N.K. Jemisin Is Trying to Keep the World From Ending" in Gentlemen's Quarterly (2018 Nov 28)

 * there is some sense in which that lack of establishment approval is a blessing, for an artist must learn (the sooner the better) that he or she works for the work itself, not for approval, and it is easier to establish that sense of creative independence when approval is lacking than when one is seduced by it.
 * Erica Jong "Blood and Guts: The Tricky Problem of Being a Woman Writer in the Late Twentieth Century" In The Writer on Her Work edited by Janet Sternburg (2000)

 * ... the primary obstacle for any artis: not piracy, but obscurity.
 * Kevin Kelly, "Engines of Wow," WIRED (2023)

 * The first major European development in mathematics occurred in the work of the artists. Imbued with the Greek doctrines that man must study himself and the real world, the artists began to paint reality... instead of interpreting religious themes in symbolic styles. They applied Euclidean geometry to create a new system of perspective... From the work of the artists, the mathematicians derived ideas and problems that led to a new branch of mathematics,.
 * Morris Kline, Mathematics for the Nonmathematician (1967)

 * Two things make the future real, the artist's imagination and the worker's hope. Fascism destroys both. Therefore the artist and the worker must unite to destroy Fascism. The Fascist artist is a traitor, the neutral is already dead. Art and anti-Fascism are synonymous.
 * John Langdon-Davies, . Quoted in

 * Dead he is not, but departed,—for the artist never dies.
 * Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Nuremburg, Stanza 13. In Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 43-45.

M - R

 * He's being irritating and irresponsible, but what do you expect? He's an artist.
 * Ken MacLeod, ‘The Entire Immense Superstructure’: An Installation, in Reach for Infinity (2014) edited by Jonathan Strahan, and published by Solaris ISBN 978-1-78108-203-4, p. 288

 * The authentic artist carries within himself another world to which the ordinary person has no access. The great value of the poet is that he enriches us with new, thoroughly experienced feelings, with unseen or differently seen landscapes.
 * Drunk from the Bitter Truth: The Poems of Anna Margolin translated from Yiddish by Shirley Kumove (2017)

 * It is only after years of preparation that the young [artist] should touch color — not color used descriptively, that is, but as a means of personal expression.
 * Henri Matisse in Christian Science Monitor (25 March 1985)

 * we are all supposed to become artists; that the transformation of culture through art is the proper understanding of what you can do with psychedelics besides blow your own mind. And I really think, you know, what we need to do is put the art-pedal to the floor, and understand that this is art—we are involved in some kind of enormous piece of performance art called Western civilization, and, you know, it's been a C-minus performance so far … and they are just about to reach out with the hook and drag us offstage, unless we begin pulling rabbits out of the hat pretty furiously.
 * Terence McKenna Global Perspectives and Psychedelic Poetics (1994)

 * We're creators by permission, by grace as it were. No one creates alone, of and by himself. An artist is an instrument that registers something already existent, something which belongs to the whole world, and which, if he is an artist, he is compelled to give back to the world.
 * Henry Miller The Rosy Crucifixion I : Sexus (1949)

 * This sudden importance of art—an importance discovered by ideological movements, by the State, and by the business world—has made the artist a central figure on the public place. His earlier revolt against society, his marginal role as an entertainer, have of course predestined him to the role of an ally of all progressive movements that promise a universal society, that is, a universal public for his books, poems, paintings and partitions. His shudder before the ugliness of capitalist civilization, his isolation from the masses whose warmth and understanding he genuinely needs, make him an ideal, because uncritical, partner of the progressive ideologues who preach the overthrow of all that he hates.
 * Thomas Molnar, The Decline of the Intellectual (1961) Ch. 4 "The Intellectual as a Progressive"

 * The observation of nature is part of an artist's life, it enlarges his form-knowledge, keeps him fresh and from working only by formula, and feeds inspiration
 * Henry Moore, Sir Herbert Edward Read, David Sylvester (1957) Henry Moore: 1921-1948, p. xxxi

 * There is one quality I find in all the artists I admire most - men like Masaccio, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Cezanne. I mean a disturbing element, a distortion, giving evidence of a struggle of some sort.
 * Henry Moore in: Alan G. Wilkinson (2002) Henry Moore. Writings and Conversations. p. 117

 * Revolution is not only won by numbers, but by visionaries, and if artists aren't visionaries, then we have no business doing what we do.
 * Cherríe Moraga "Art in America, Con Acento" (1992) anthologized in Women Writing Resistance: Essays on Latin America and the Caribbean edited by Jennifer Browdy

 * The social outcome of the arts and crafts movement was not commensurate with the needs of the new situation; as Mr. Frank Lloyd Wright pointed out in his memorable speech at Hull House in 1908, the machine itself was as much an instrument of art, in the hands of an artist, as were the simple tools and utensils.
 * Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (1934) Ch. 7 "Assimilation of the Machine"

 * A man who works with his hands is a laborer; a man who works with his hands and his brain is a craftsman; but a man who works with his hands and his brain and his heart is an artist.
 * , Between You and Me, p. 108, 1948, Beechhurst Press

 * It is an artist’s dream/goal to share their work with the world, and I have been blessed in that regard. I have enjoyed creating and sharing it all…(What advice do you have for young artists?) DO: Without hesitation, I would say just be yourself and let your imagination, thoughts, beliefs, views, visions — or whatever inspires you — be seen. Be vulnerable, and share what is inside you. Regardless of what medium you chose to create, open up and share your gift.
 * Daphne Odjig Interview (2014)

 * The unknown shines through the productions of great artists in partially articulated form. The awe-inspiring ineffable begins to be realized but retains a terrifying abundance of its transcendent power. That is the role of art, and that is the role of artists. It is no wonder we keep their dangerous, magical productions locked up, framed, and apart from everything else.
 * Jordan Peterson, Beyond Order (2021), pp. 217–218

 * What do you think an artist is? An imbecile who has only eyes if he is a painter, ears if he's a musician, or a lyre in every chamber of his heart if he's a poet, or even, if he's a boxer, only some muscles? Quite the contrary, he is at the same time a political being constantly alert to the horrifying, the passionate or pleasing events of the world, shaping himself completely in their image... No, painting is not made to decorate apartments. It's an offensive and defensive weapon against the enemy.
 * Pablo Picasso, interview with (March 24, 1945) as quoted by, Picasso: Fifty Years of His Art (1946), also by Dr. Neil Cox, An Interview with Pablo Picasso (2014)

 * In the twentieth century, modernism and postmodernism took over, and their practitioners disdained beauty as bourgeois, saccharine, lightweight. Art was deliberately made incomprehensible or ugly or shocking... on the assumption that our predilections... were reversible social constructions. This also led to an exaggeration of the dynamic of social status that has always been part of the arts. The elite arts used to be aligned with the economic and political aristocracy. They involved displays of sumptuosity and the flaunting of rare and precious skills that only the idle rich could cultivate. But now that any schmo could afford a Mozart CD or go to a free museum, artists had to figure out new ways to differentiate themselves from the rabble. So art became baffling and uninterpretable—unless you had some acquaintance with arcane theory.
 * Steven Pinker, "A Biological Understanding of Human Nature" The New Humanists ed. John Brockman (2003).

 * To express himself well, the artist should be hidden... The trouble is that if an artist knows he has genius, he's done for. The only salvation is to work like a labourer, and not have delusions of grandeur.
 * Pierre-Auguste Renoir, quoted in: Raymond Durgnat (1974) Jean Renoir: Raymond Durgnat, p. 370

 * The artist who uses the least of what is called imagination, will be the greatest!
 * Pierre-Auguste Renoir, quoted in: Giles Auty (1977) The Art of Self-Deception: An Intelligible Guide, p. 88

 * Where every public decision has to be justified in the scales of corporate profits, poetry unsettles these apparently self-evident propositions-not through ideology, but by its very presence and ways of being, its embodiment of states of longing and desire...poetry is always being created anew, in new places, by unforetold hands and voices. In this, it is like the many movements against demoralizing power. We don't know where either will come from. This is a story without an end.
 * Adrienne Rich Preface to What is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics (1993)

 * In a time when so many artists have learned to confabulate with extremes of horror and alienation, the most daring thing an artist can do is to fill a book, a gallery, or a theater with joy, hope, and beauty.
 * Betty and Theodore Roszak, "Deep Form in Art and Nature" Alexandria 4, Vol.4 The Order of Beauty and Nature (1997) ed. David Fideler.

S - Z

 * The artist occupies a unique position vis-à-vis the society in which he lives. However dependent upon it he may be for his livelihood, he is still somewhat removed from its immediate struggles for social status or for economic supremacy. He has no really vested interest in the status quo. The only vested interest-or one might say, professional concern-which he does have in the present way of things rests in his ability to observe them, to assimilate the multifarious details of reality, to form some intelligent opinion about the society or at least an opinion consistent with his temperament. That being the case, he must maintain an attitude at once detached and deeply involved.
 * Ben Shahn "On Nonconformity" (1956/7)

 * In framing an artist, art hath thus decreed, To make some good, but others to exceed.
 * William Shakespeare, Pericles, Prince of Tyre (c. 1607-08), Act II, scene 3, line 15

 * Dead artists always bring out an older, richer crowd.
 * Elizabeth Shaw, on a fauvism exhibition that drew 2,000 people, The New York Times (26 March 1976)

 * It was Homer who gave laws to the artist.
 * Francis Wayland, The Iliad and the Bible. In Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), pp. 43-45

 * Kore-eda knows: A scared artist is a contradiction in terms; it betrays their vocation.
 * Armond White, "Deneuve and Halle Berry in the Age of Fear " (10 July 2020), National Review

 * Mathematics is too arduous and uninviting a field to appeal to those to whom it does not give great rewards. These rewards are of exactly the same character as those of the artist. To see a difficult uncompromising material take living shape and meaning is to be Pygmalion, whether the material is stone or hard, stonelike logic. To see meaning and understanding come where there has been no meaning and no understanding is to share the work of a demiurge. No amount of technical correctness and no amount of labour can replace this creative moment, whether in the life of a mathematician or of a painter or musician. Bound up with it is a judgement of values, quite parallel to the judgement of values that belongs to the painter or the musician. Neither the artist nor the mathematician may be able to tell you what constitutes the difference between a significant piece of work and an inflated trifle; but if he is not able to recognise this in his own heart, he is no artist and no mathematician.
 * Norbert Wiener, Ex-Prodigy: My Childhood and Youth (1964)

 * Art is the most intense mode of Individualism that the world has known. I am inclined to say that it is the only real mode of Individualism that the world has known.' Crime, which, under certain conditions, may seem to have created Individualism, must take cognisance of other people and interfere with them. It belongs to the sphere of action. But alone, without any reference to his neighbours, without any interference, the artist can fashion a beautiful thing; and if he does not do it solely for his own pleasure, he is not an artist at all.
 * Oscar Wilde in The Soul of Man under Socialism (1891)

 * For an artist there is no more serious and, at the same time, more joyous task than to create, through art, a new aesthetic, and ultimately, a new way of being.
 * Karel Zeman, as quoted in Pauline Sameshima, Seeing Red: A Pedagogy of Parallax: an Epistolary Bildungsroman on Artful Scholarly Inquiry (Youngstown, NY: Cambria Press, 2007), pp. 156–157, accessed 26 August 2013

 * The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.
 * Émile Zola, as quoted in Wisdom for the Soul : Five Millennia of Prescriptions for Spiritual Healing (2006) by Larry Chang, p. 55.

title: Artist