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Throughout human history, the apostles of purity, those who have claimed to possess a total explanation, have wrought havoc among mere mixed-up human beings.

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
Humans
Explanation
Havoc
Throughout
Wrought
Total
Claimed
Mere
Fanaticism
Beings
Apostles
Among
Mixed
History
Purity
Human
Possess

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If my child had prejudice in his head, I'd be ashamed. I would see it as my failure as a parent.
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England in a way is lucky. It's an island, so the frontiers are given by the sea.
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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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You can adhere to your faith, but that faith needs to march in line with the rest of the world and needs to find a way of expressing itself in the modern world.
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Bread and books: food for the body and food for the soul - what could be more worthy of our respect, and even love?
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perhaps, if one wishes to remain an individual in the midst of the teeming multitudes, one must make oneself grotesque.
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Religion, a mediaeval form of unreason, when combined with modern weaponry becomes a real threat to our freedoms.
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My heart broke open and history fell in.
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I determined to make my peace with Islam, even at the cost of my pride. Those who were surprised and displeased by what I did perhaps failed to see that ... I wanted to make peace between the warring halves of the world, which were also the warring halves of my soul.
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Not even the visionary or mystical experience ever lasts very long. It is for art to capture that experience, to offer it to, in the case of literature, its readers to be, for a secular, materialist culture, some sort of replacement for what the love of god offers in the world of faith.
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Such is the miraculous nature of the future of exiles: what is first uttered in the impotence of an overheated apartment becomes the fate of nations.
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If by some bizarre chance there turns out to be a god [...], I'm willing to bet he's an atheist too.
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But love is what we want, not freedom. Who then is the unluckier man? The beloved, who is given his heart's desire and must for ever after fear its loss, or the free man, with his unlooked-for liberty, naked and alone between the captive armies of the earth?
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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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One of the things a writer is for is to say the unsayable, speak the unspeakable and ask difficult questions.
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My children are English, and both of their mothers were English.
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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.
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That's the trouble with you sad-city types: a place has to be miserable and dull as ditchwater before you believe it's real.
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