“A people that has remained convinced of its greatness and invulnerability, that has chosen to believe such a myth in the face of all the evidence, is a people in the grip of a kind of sleep, or madness.”

Source: The Satanic Verses

Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Do you have more details about the quote "A people that has remained convinced of its greatness and invulnerability, that has chosen to believe such a myth in th…" by Salman Rushdie?
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Salman Rushdie 122
British Indian novelist and essayist 1947

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“I don't think all artists are mad, but there is statistical medical evidence that a lot of creative people suffer from various mood disorders.”

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Context: I don't think all artists are mad, but there is statistical medical evidence that a lot of creative people suffer from various mood disorders. They fall somewhere on the spectrum of being bipolar, of being borderline autistic and so on. These things are there. Now of course these days you can go to college and when you come out you are a professional artist and you can run a gallery as a business and have a career. That is a very valid way for an artist to make a living. But it doesn't make for a very interesting story. It doesn't have a lot of mythic subtext. … For me a lot of the world really is like that. The scenes in my book that people describe as "such a hallucinatory sequence" … I don't see the world like that all the time, but I see the world like that a lot.
So what am I going to do about that? Am I going to go crazy? Am I going to institutionalize myself? Am I going to go and work in a cubicle as a telemarketer so that I don't give vent to that? Or am I going to take that and channel it into my work? It is a gift.

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