Salman Rushdie Quotes About Culture

Quotes about: Culture

• 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.

  Salman Rushdie

  Atheist, Ideas, Religion

  Salman Rushdie (1990). “Is nothing sacred?”, Penguin (Non-Classics)

• Not even the visionary or mystical experience ever lasts very long. It is for art to capture that experience, to offer it to, in the case of literature, its readers; to be, for a secular, materialist culture, some sort of replacement for what the love of god offers in the world of faith.

  Salman Rushdie

  Love, Art, Mystical Experiences

  Salman Rushdie (1990). “Is nothing sacred?”, Penguin (Non-Classics)

• Sometimes we feel we straddle two cultures; at other times, that we fall between two stools.

  Salman Rushdie

  Fall, Two, Culture

  Salman Rushdie (2012). “Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991”, p.12, Random House

• If the culture shifts, if people think differently about women, the art will shift, too. You can't ask art to make social change. It's not what it's for.

  Salman Rushdie

  Art, Thinking, People

  "Salman Rushdie, Deepa Mehta: Movies Not to Blame for Real-World Violence (Q&A)". "Hollywood Reporter" Interview, www.hollywoodreporter.com. January 30, 2013.

• 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.... Actually Existing Islam ... which makes literalism a weapon and redescription a crime, will never let the likes of me in.

  Salman Rushdie

  Islam, Culture, Weapons

  "Excerpts From Rushdie's Address: 1,000 Days 'Trapped Inside a Metaphor'". Address at Columbia University, www.nytimes.com. December 12, 1991.

• The Koran was revealed at a time of great change in the Arab world, the seventh-century shift from a matriarchal nomadic culture to an urban patriarchal system.

  Salman Rushdie

  Culture, World, Urban

• 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.

  Salman Rushdie

  Father, Mean, Civilization

  "Excerpts From Rushdie's Address: 1,000 Days 'Trapped Inside a Metaphor'". Address at Columbia University, www.nytimes.com. December 12, 1991.

• What I've always tried to find in my books are points at which the private lives of the characters, and also my own, intersect with the public life of the culture.

  Salman Rushdie

  Book, Character, Culture

• The act of migration puts into crisis everything about the migrating individual or group, everything about identity and selfhood and culture and belief. So if this is a novel about migration it must be that act of putting in question. It must perform the crisis it describes.

  Salman Rushdie

  Identity, Migration, Groups

• The history of a culture can be determined by its untranslatable words.

  Salman Rushdie

  Culture, Determined

• There is no alternative to the peaceful coexistence of cultures.

  Salman Rushdie

  Peaceful, Culture, Alternatives

  "'Terror Is Glamour'". Interview with Erich Follath, www.spiegel.de. August 28, 2006.

• I remember when I was young, many cities in the Muslim world were cosmopolitan cities with a lot of culture.

  Salman Rushdie

  Cities, Culture, World

• My father decided that he was such a admirer of Ibn Rushd's philosophy, thinking that he changed the family name to Rushdie. I realized why my father was so interested in him, because he was really an incredibly modernizing voice inside our Islamic culture.

  Salman Rushdie

  Father, Philosophy, Islamic

  Source: www.pbs.org

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