I think it's a stupid way to read a book, ... to say that because something happens to one person the author is trying to suggest that all people are like this. The novel is the art of the particular. And I'm talking about a particular person whose development from innocence to guilt, if you like, is his own particular narrative arc. The point is to make that coherent - not to read the book as some kind of simple allegory, but to read it as a story about a person.
More Quotes from Salman Rushdie:
We must conclude that it is not only a particular political ideology that has failed, but the idea that men and women could ever define themselves in terms that exclude their spiritual needs.Salman Rushdie
He told her he fell from the sky and lived. She took a deep breath and believed him, because of her father's faith in the myriad and contradictory possibilities of life, and because, too, of what the mountain had taught her. Okay, she said, exhaling. I'll buy it. Just don't tell my mother, all right The universe was a place of wonders, and only habituation, the anaesthesia of the everyday, dulled our sight. She had read, a couple of days back, that as part of their natural processes of combustion, the stars in the skies crushed carbon into diamonds. The idea of the stars raining diamonds into the void that sounded like a miracle, too. If that could happen, so could this. Babies fell out of zillionth-floor windows and bounced. There was a scene about that in Franois Truffaut's movie L'Argent du Poche...She focused her thoughts. Sometimes, she decided to say, wonderful things happen to me, too.
Salman Rushdie
Most of what matters in your life takes place in your absence.
Salman Rushdie
Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination and of the heart.
Salman Rushdie
I do not need the idea of God to explain the world I live in.
Salman Rushdie
Readers Who Like This Quotation Also Like:
Based on Topics: Art Quotes, Books Quotes, People Quotes, Stupidity QuotesBased on Keywords: allegory
When I look back at the way that I was in that documentary I cringe.
Benjamin Cohen
The law courts must appear as a threatening gesture toward secret vice. The bank must declare: here your money is secure and well looked after by honest people.
Adolf Loos
Gang violence in America is not a sudden problem. It has been a part of urban life for years, offering an aggressive definition and identity to those seeking a place to belong in the chaos of large metropolitan areas.
Dave Reichert