Salman Rushdie Quotes

A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.

Great theatre is about challenging how we think and encouraging us to fantasize about a world we aspire to.

Trickster stories are pleasurable, contradictory, annoying, abrasive. They're powerful, transformational acts of liberation because they are not nailed down to the real, to the representation of something in the world.

Political art - not always a contradiction in terms - can destroy institutions, or eat away at them.

A playwright can drop a little acid in the water and it washes away a lot of rust.

Art is not something to decorate a wall. Art is a political weapon.

I think at some point there may be artists who will get fed up, and they deliberately want to use their art as a means to rock the waves a little bit. And instead of doing the status quo, they'll deliberately go out to really make a change. I think Kendrick Lamar is an example of that.

When I discovered metaphor and what it meant, I got really excited. That was what really pushed me through into music.

Art is a weapon in the struggle of ideas, the class struggle.

You can't be at your full creative power if you are sedated.

I'm not a writer myself, so I'm forced to try to get what's a sort of an odour or a colour or something I feel in my head from a writer, and that's a... I don't have a recipe for that process. I don't know what it is... it's different every time.

I think that there are artists of different genres whose calling is to use their art to hope to affect and better the human condition - whether it's System of a Down, or Rage Against the Machine, or Public Enemy, or the Clash, Bruce Springsteen, or Pete Seeger. It's a group that I'm proud to be counted among.

I feel like I'm the most creative when I'm bored.

People like Dick Gregory, Paul Robeson, Harry Belafonte and Nina Simone show me what the definition of an artist is - it isn't just to make art but to speak truth to what's happening, speak beauty into the world, speak love into the world and also... get involved.

I wish that I'd written John Lennon's 'Imagine.'

One of the greatest things about the theatre is how it can completely change the way you see the world around you. 'Dear Evan Hansen' did this for me.

Within the theater lies the power to stimulate and alter the hearts and minds of both the privileged and those who have too long been denied.

When I want to get inspired, I'll put a Pixar movie on silent and listen to Nas.

In life, we have two segments: arts and science. We need science to make our lives easier. But what do we live for? We enjoy life through arts. So it's an artistes duty to question the wrongs happening in the society.

Art is activism.

All good art should be political, I think, and inevitably it all becomes political really, in one way or another.

In terms of the symbolism, I think that if you do it right, writing is a bit like dreaming.

I get inspiration from all kinds of things: I can get it from hanging out with my son, from hanging out with my wife, from checking out different artists, from hearing something at a party.

Poetry is how I feed the soul, and it's how I fire the furnace of writing.

I don't believe that there is a separation between art and political consciousness.