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The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas - uncertainty, progress, change - into crimes.

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
Idea
Sacred
Culture
Crime
Notions
Change
Progress
Crimes
Ideas
Turn
Seeks
Simply
Uncertainty
Quite
Atheist
Turns
Conservative
Religion
Notion

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One of the strange things about violent and authoritarian regimes is they don't like the glare of negative publicity.
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Human beings understand themselves and shape their futures by arguing and challenging and questioning and saying the un-sayable, not by bowing the knee whether to gods or to men.
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There are two things in Indian history - one is the incredible optimism and potential of the place, and the other is the betrayal of that potential - for example, corruption. Those two strands intertwine through the whole of Indian history, and maybe not just Indian history.
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Even when things are at their worst, there's a little voice in your head saying, 'Good story!'
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Look at history. It's not the account of a species at peace.
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For many people, I've ceased to be a human being. I've become an issue, a bother, an affair.... And has it really been so long since religions persecuted people, burning them as heretics, drowning them as witches, that you can't recognize religious persecution when you see it?
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I stand with Charlie Hebdo, as we all must, to defend the art of satire.
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A mature society understands that at the heart of democracy is argument.
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Perhaps because my relationship with my father went through such a long, bumpy time, it's been very important for me to work to try to keep lines of communication open between my sons and myself to try to avoid my father's mistakes. At least if you're making mistakes, make different mistakes.
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The worst, most insidious effect of censorship is that, in the end, it can deaden the imagination of the people. Where there is no debate, it is hard to go on remembering, every day, that there is a suppressed side to every argument.
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There is nothing like a War for the reinvention of lives.
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They lived in a great city, a metropolis of many narratives that converged briefly and then separated for ever, discovering their different dooms in that crowd of stories through which all of us, following our own destinies, had to push and shove to find our way through, or out.
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The sixty-minute drama form has become very rich.
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Language upon a silvered tongue affords enchantment enough.
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I am clearly vulnerable to these more passionate and volatile unstable relationships. I am trying to not be so vulnerable.
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He would dream of discovering a magic optometrist from whom he would purchase a pair of green-tinged spectacles which would correct his regrettable myopia, and after that he would be able to see through the dense, blinding air to the fabulous world beneath.
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If Woody Allen were a Muslim, he'd be dead by now.
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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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I don't know what to say about literary critics. I think it's probably best to say nothing.
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I don't think people cry reading 'Midnight's Children,' but a lot of people seem to cry watching the movie.
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