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

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Too many people had spent too long demonizing or totemizing me to listen seriously to what I had to say.
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Sometimes, people trying to commit suicide manage it in a manner that leaves them breathless with astonishment.
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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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Make as much racket as you like people. Noise is life and an excess of noise is a sign that life is good. There will be time for us all to be quiet when we are safely dead.
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Ideas are interesting to me, and religions are a place where ideas have been very subtly embodied for thousands of years. All literature started as sacred literature.
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India, the new myth--a collective fiction in which anything was possible, a fable rivalled only by the two other mighty fantasies: money and God.
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There's a lot of conflict and darkness inside everybody's family. We all pretend to outsiders that it's not so but behind locked doors there are usually high emotions running.
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If love is a yearning to be like (even to become) the beloved, then hatred, it must be said, can be engendered by the same ambition, when it cannot be fulfilled.
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It seems that the right of freedom of speech that was enshrined in numerous constitutions is now under attack by religious institutions.
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I will come back to India - so deal with it.
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Like everybody else, I've had relationships in which I was passionately in love but was completely miserable all the time and didn't trust the person I was in love with one inch.
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You can't judge an internal injury by the size of the hole.
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You don't fight radical conservatism with not-quite-so radical conservatism.
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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.
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I think anyone who knows me at all knows that I have been a movie addict all my life. I grew up in a city obsessed by cinema and where there are cinemas on every street corner.
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The question I'm always asking myself is: are we masters or victims? Do we make history, or does history make us? Do we shape the world, or are we just shaped by it? The question of do we have agency in our lives or whether we are just passive victims of events is, I think, a great question, and one that I have always tried to ask.
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Even the Islam stuff I thought was pretty respectful about Islam in a funny way. I mean, yes, from a secular point of view, but it talks about the birth of this religion, and I thought it was pretty admiring of the person at the center of it, the prophet of Islam.
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From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable.
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War used to be something you could stand on the nearby hill and watch. Now we have total war everybody's in it. We have total economics as well. Everything affects everybody. The Malaysian currency shakes, and people around the world are seriously affected.
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Something was badly amiss with the spiritual life of the planet...Too many demons inside people claiming to believe in God.
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