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What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.

Salman Rushdie

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Salman Rushdie
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: June 19
Actor
Essayist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Bombay
Rushdie
Joseph Anton
Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie
Freedom
Banned
Without
Ceases
Censorship
Cease
Honesty
Integrity
Censoring
Exist
Censored
Expression
Offend

More quotes by Salman Rushdie

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It may be that the books that were best liked in your lifetime are not the ones that are best liked 100 years later.
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Many of us didn't believe in the image of bin Laden as a wandering Old Man of the Mountains, living on plants and insects in an inhospitable cave somewhere on the porous Pakistan-Afghan border.
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Only the foolish, blinded by language's conventions, think of fire as red or gold. Fire is blue at it's melancholy rim, green in it's envious heart. It may burn white, or even, in it's greatest rages, black.
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In the cookie of life, friends are the chocolate chips.
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I used to say, 'There is a God-shaped hole in me.' For a long time I stressed the absence, the hole. Now I find it is the shape which has become more important.
Salman Rushdie
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For me, what I've always seen in writers and artists is the courage it takes to make an original work of art. I think the real risks in literature are linguistic and intellectual, and I hope we can highlight those, as well as political courage.
Salman Rushdie
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My heart broke open and history fell in.
Salman Rushdie
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People are always telling me that they've seen people reading my books on the subway, or the beach, or whenever.
Salman Rushdie
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All my adult life, if I didn't have several hours a day to sit in a room by myself, I would get antsy and irritable.
Salman Rushdie
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I seem to have fallen for women with missing parents. Goodness knows what it signifies.
Salman Rushdie
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What I've always seen in writers and artists is the courage it takes to make an original work of art. I think the real risks in literature are linguistic and intellectual, and I hope we can highlight those, as well as political courage.
Salman Rushdie
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If Woody Allen were a Muslim, he'd be dead by now.
Salman Rushdie
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Most of what matters in your life takes place in your absence.
Salman Rushdie
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And using that - the birth of a religion, it suggests that you have got two tests. You have the test of weakness. When you're weak, do you compromise, do you bend, do you give in, do you accommodate? And then the test of strength. When you're strong, are you merciful, are you generous, or are you cruel?
Salman Rushdie
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When I'm writing a book, sentence by sentence, I'm not thinking theoretically. I'm just trying to work out the story from inside the characters I've got.
Salman Rushdie
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Stories in families are colossally important. Every family has stories: some funny, some proud, some embarrassing, some shameful. Knowing them is proof of belonging to the family.
Salman Rushdie
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As though she had entered a fable, as though she were no more than words crawling along a dry page, or as though she were becoming that page itself, that surface on which her story would be written and across which there blew a hot and merciless wind, turning her body to papyrus, her skin to parchment, her soul to paper.
Salman Rushdie
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Writers have an opinion about the world and offer arguments about the world. They should offer contemplation.
Salman Rushdie
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There is a widespread difficulty in the Muslim world, which has to do with how the people are taught about examining their own history. A whole range of stuff has been placed off limits.
Salman Rushdie
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One of the things I've learnt is not to depend on there being a woman in your life to make it work. I love my work, I love my children, I've got wonderful friends, you know, I have a nice life.
Salman Rushdie