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
“I admit it: above all things, I fear absurdity.”
Source: Midnight's Children
“What you were is forever who you are.”
Source: Midnight's Children
“For every snake, there is a ladder; for every ladder, a snake”
Source: Midnight's Children
"Imaginary Homelands (1992)
Source: Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991
Contexte: 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.
“The lessons one learns at school are not always the ones the school thinks it's teaching.”
Source: Joseph Anton: A Memoir
“Everything has shape, if you look for it. There is no escape from form.”
Source: Midnight's Children
“There is nothing like a War for the reinvention of lives…”
Source: Midnight's Children
“What's the use of stories that aren't even true?”
Source: Haroun and the Sea of Stories
“My horizon's have shrunk and I have only endings to write.”
Source: The Enchantress of Florence
“Nobody can judge an internal injury by the size of the superficial wound.”
Variante: You can't judge an internal injury by the size of the hole.
Source: The Satanic Verses
“My heart broke open and history fell in.”
Source: The Ground Beneath Her Feet
“What grows best in the heat: fantasy; unreason; lust.”
Source: Midnight's Children
