Imaginary Homelands Quotes

“Go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets. Take a deep breath before you begin talking. Aim for the stars. Keep grinning. Be bloody-minded. Argue with the world. And never forget that writing is as close as we get to keeping a hold on the thousand and one things--childhood, certainties, cities, doubts, dreams, instants, phrases, parents, loves--that go on slipping , like sand, through our fingers.”
― Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991

“The word 'translation' comes, etymologically, from the Latin for 'bearing across'. Having been borne across the world, we are translated men. It is normally supposed that something always gets lost in translation; I cling, obstinately to the notion that something can also be gained.”
― Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991

“Meaning is a shaky edifice we build out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old fillms, small victories, people hated, people loved; perhaps it is because our sense of what is the case is constructed from such inadequate materials that we defend it so fiercely, even to death.”
― Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991

“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.”
― Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991

“But human beings do not perceive things whole; we are not gods but wounded creatures, cracked lenses, capable 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 our sense of what is the case is constructed from such inadequate materials that we defend it so fiercely, even to the death.”
― Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991

“Sometimes we feel we straddle two cultures; at other times, that we fall between two stools.”
― Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991

“human beings do not perceive things whole; we are not gods but wounded creatures, cracked lenses, capable only of fractured perceptions”
― Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991

“The modern world lacks not only hiding places, but certainties. There is no consensus about reality between, for example, the nations of the North and of the South. What President Reagan says is happening in Central America differs so radically from, say, the Sandinista version, that there is almost no common ground. It becomes necessary to take sides, to say whether or not one thinks of Nicaragua as the United States’s ‘front yard’. (Vietnam, you will recall, was the ‘back yard’.) It seems to me imperative that literature enter such arguments, because what is being disputed is nothing less than what is the case, what is truth and what untruth. If writers leave the business of making pictures of the world to politicians, it will be one of history’s great and most abject abdications.”
― Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991

“...[A]nswers are easier to come by, and less reliable, than questions. If religion is an answer, if political ideology is an answer, then literature is an inquiry; great literature, by asking extraordinary questions, opens new doors in our minds.”
― Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991

“In the twenty-seven years since the killing of President Kennedy, there has been a good deal of disturbance in the American dream. The cult of individualism, of a man's (nos so often a woman's ) ability and right to pull himself up by his own bootstraps and wit, which lies at the heart of that dream, has produced more Oswalds, more Sirhans, more Mansons and Jim Joneses, than Lincolns, of late. The representative figure of American individualism is no longer that log-cabin-to-White-House President, but rather a lone man with a gun, seeking vengeance against a world that will not conform to his own sense of what has worth.”
― Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991

“And so it's interesting to remember that when Mahatma Gandhi, the father of an earlier freedom movement, came to England and was asked what he thought of English civilization, he replied: 'I think it would be a good idea.”
― Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991

“Bad times traditionally produce good books.”
― Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991

“In the twenty-seven years since the killing of President Kennedy, there has been a good deal of disturbance in the American dream. The cult of individualism, of a man's (not so often a woman's) ability and right to pull himself up by his own bootstraps and wit, which lies at the heart of that dream, has produced more Oswalds, more Sirhans, more Mansons and Jim Joneses, than Lincolns, of late. The representative figure of American individualism is no longer that log-cabin-to-White-House President, but rather a lone man with a gun, seeking vengeance against a world that will not conform to his own sense of what has worth.”
― Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991