Salman Rushdie Quotes

Art is not meant to change the world.

I don't believe that art is just for entertainment. I want to create art that is meaningful in some way.

Public intellectuals come from a range of areas and use their expertise to comment more widely than just their field. They want to make a contribution to public space, and they stick their necks out to do it.

Art never harms itself by keeping aloof from the social problems of the day: rather, by so doing, it more completely realises for us that which we desire.

I think we give too much importance to artists talking about the art and the film and the books and the plays and the music - it's done; the material is there. But we talk about it because it's part of the game. I'm comfortable with it.

The best songs/films/collections expose truths about life and make them universally accessible; they progress humanity.

What's the point of art, of any art, if it doesn't let us see with a little bit of objectivity where we are?

I think, in the West, we often discount the arts as nice but not that important. Certainly in America when we cut funding for schools, the arts are the first programs to go. But the arts built the things we need more than anything else: collaboration and co-operation and creativity.

It would, of course, be wrong to say that the arts have no social value. They have tremendous power and can often, indirectly, make our world a better place to live in.

The trumped-up charges against kitsch and sentimentality should disturb us and make us suspicious.

A culture's ability to understand the world and itself is critical to its survival. But today we are led into the arena of public debate by seers whose main gift is their ability to compel people to continue to watch them.

We have a reading, a talking, and a writing public. When shall we have a thinking?

The public square is more public than ever, but minds are rarely changed in 140 character bursts and by selfies.

What I want is to create a discussion about what is happening around the world and to provoke some debate with these pictures. Nothing more than this.

How awful that the artist has become nothing but the after-dinner mint of society.

Everything about art has become problematic; its inner life, its relation to society, even its right to exist.

the wrongs of society can be more deeply impressed on a large class of readers in the form of fiction than by essays, sermons, or the facts of science.

Art isn't supposed to change the world, but it can.

When art becomes merely shock value, our sense of humanity is slowly degraded.

There is this thing called the university, and everybody goes there now. And there are these things called teachers who make students read this book with good ideas or that book with good ideas until that's where we get our ideas. We don't think them; we read them in books. I like Utopian talk, speculation about what our planet should be, anger about what our planet is. I think writers are the most important members of society, not just potentially but actually. Good writers must have and stand by their own ideas.

In Europe they understand that the arts are incredibly important both culturally and economically.

Shakespeare has done far more for the world than the Bible.

I think if it doesn't do what I say, if it doesn't do what I want, if it isn't politically subversive, if it isn't sexy, if it isn't stylish to make all that happen then it isn't truthfully worth listening to.

If people really stopped and realized how much art and creative people move the world versus politics and religion, I mean it’s not even up for debate. An artist at least creates things, puts things into the world. Where as these other people are destroying things, taking things out of the world.

If the liberal arts do nothing else they provide engaging metaphors for the thinking they displace.