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Doubt, it seems to me, is the central condition of a human being in the twentieth century.
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
Century
Doubt
Seems
Human
Humans
Twentieth
Central
Condition
Conditions
More quotes by Salman Rushdie
I was 21 in 1968, so I'm as much a child of the '60s as is possible to be. In those years the subject of religion had really almost disappeared the idea that religion was going to be a major force in the life of our societies, in the West anyway, would have seemed absurd in 1968.
Salman Rushdie
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.
Salman Rushdie
Originality is dangerous. It challenges, questions, overturns assumptions, unsettles moral codes.
Salman Rushdie
I know who I am, I know what I'm for, and I know what I'm willing to fight for.
Salman Rushdie
The real risks for any artist are taken in pushing the work to the limits of what is possible, in the attempt to increase the sum of what it is possible to think. Books become good when they go to this edge and risk falling over it -when they endanger the artist by reason of what he has, or has not, artistically dared.
Salman Rushdie
But there's one thing we must all be clear about: terrorism is not the pursuit of legitimate goals by some sort of illegitimate means. Whatever the murderers may be trying to achieve, creating a better world certainly isn't one of their goals. Instead they are out to murder innocent people.
Salman Rushdie
I don't know what to say about literary critics. I think it's probably best to say nothing.
Salman Rushdie
The mistake of the West was to put the Sauds on the throne of Saudi Arabia and give them control of the world's oil fortune, which they then used to propagate Wahhabi Islam.
Salman Rushdie
In the end, you write the book that grabs you by the throat and demands to be written.
Salman Rushdie
I would argue that religion comes from a desire to get to the questions of, 'Where do we come from?' and 'How shall we live?' And I would say I don't need religion to answer those questions.
Salman Rushdie
What had been (at the beginning) no bigger than a full stop had expanded into a comma, a word, a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter now it was bursting into more complex developments, becoming, one might say, a book - perhaps an encylopaedia - even a whole language.
Salman Rushdie
I fell victim to the temptation of every autobiographer, to the illusion that since the past exists only in one's memories and the words which strive vainly to encapsulate them, it is possible to create past events simply by saying they occurred.
Salman Rushdie
There is no magic on earth strong enough to wipe out the legacies of one's parents.
Salman Rushdie
Now I know what a ghost is. Unfinished business, that's what.
Salman Rushdie
One of the things I've thought about 'Midnight's Children' is that it is a novel which puts a Muslim family at the centre of the Indian experience.
Salman Rushdie
What happened in Pakistan was that people were told: You're all Muslim, so now you're a country. As we saw in 1971 with the Bangladesh secession, the answer to that was: 'Oh no, we're not.'
Salman Rushdie
Religion, a mediaeval form of unreason, when combined with modern weaponry becomes a real threat to our freedoms. This religious totalitarianism has caused a deadly mutation in the heart of Islam and we see the tragic consequences in Paris today.
Salman Rushdie
If the culture shifts, if people think differently about women, the art will shift, too. You can't ask art to make social change. It's not what it's for.
Salman Rushdie
We are described into corners, and then we must describe ourselves out of corners.
Salman Rushdie
A people that has remained convinced of its greatness and invulnerability, that has chosen to believe such a myth in the face of all the evidence, is a people in the grip of a kind of sleep, or madness.
Salman Rushdie
