Ahmed Salman Rushdie, né le 19 juin 1947 à Bombay, est un écrivain britannique d'origine indienne. Son style narratif, mêlant mythe et fantaisie avec la vie réelle, a été qualifié de réalisme magique. Objet en 1989 d'une fatwa de l'ayatollah Rouhollah Khomeini à la suite de la publication de son roman Les Versets sataniques, il est devenu un symbole de la lutte pour la liberté d'expression et contre l'obscurantisme religieux, principalement dans les médias occidentaux. Wikipedia
“S’il te faut la vitesse et ses enivrements
Prends bien tes précautions et fais ton testament.”
Haroun et la mer des histoires, 1990
Imaginary Homelands (1992)
Contexte: 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.
“Now I know what a ghost is. Unfinished business, that's what.”
Source: The Satanic Verses
“The only people who see the whole picture are the ones who step outside the frame.”
Source: The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999)
“How do you defeat terrorism? Don’t be terrorized.”
Source: Step Across This Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992-2002
“What's real and what's true aren't necessarily the same.”
Source: Midnight's Children
“Most of what matters in our lives takes place in our absence.”
Source: Midnight's Children
“Masks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull.”
Source: The Satanic Verses
“The world, somebody wrote, is the place we prove real by dying in it.”
Source: The Satanic Verses (1988)
“What can't be cured must be endured.”
The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Part II
Source: Midnight's Children
“Children are the vessels into which adults pour their poison.”
Source: Midnight's Children (1981)
“We were language's magpies by nature, stealing whatever sounded bright and shiny.”
Source: The Ground Beneath Her Feet
“To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world.”
Variante: To understand just one life you have to swallow the world... do you wonder, then, that I was a heavy child?
Source: Midnight's Children
“Not all possibilities are open to us. The world is finite; our hopes spill over its rim.”
Source: The Satanic Verses
“I learned: the first lesson of my life: nobody can face the world with his eyes open all the time.”
Source: Midnight's Children
“We crave permission openly to become our secret selves.”
Source: The Moor's Last Sigh
“I want more than what I want. (Vina Apsara)”
Source: The Ground Beneath Her Feet
“When you throw everything up in the air anything becomes possible.”
Source: The Satanic Verses
