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

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In television, the 60-minute series, 'The Wire' and 'Mad Men' and so on, the writer is the primary creative artist.
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My grandmother was very fierce and gruff. She was quite small, but she was very wide.
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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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But I - and I just think it's very - one of the problems of defending the extraordinary principle of freedom of speech is that you have to defend freedom of speech for people like that too.
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I'm definitely post-something.
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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.
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The Republicans were not always insane. They might've had politics I didn't agree with, but they weren't always actually certifiable.
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If a birth is the fall-out from the explosion caused by the union of two unstable elements, then perhaps a half-life is all we can expect.
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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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As I look back, I feel a touch of pride at my younger self's dedication to literature, which gave him the strength of mind to resist the blandishments of the enemies of promise. The sirens of ad-land sang sweetly and seductively, but I thought of Odysseus lashing himself to the mast of his ship, and somehow stayed on course.
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I'm not a prophet, but I always thought it was natural for dictatorships to fall. I remember in 1989, two months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, had you said it was going to happen no one would have believed you. The system seemed powerful and unbreakable. Suddenly overnight it blew away like dust.
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Dissensions between Muslim nations run at least as deep, if not deeper, than those nations' resentment of the West.
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With death comes honesty.
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In Iran, fundamentalism was fuelled to an extent by the regime of the Shah being supported by the West.
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Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can't forgive.
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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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I do think that there is such a thing as human nature, and that the things that we have in common are perhaps greater than the things that divide us.
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If you have children you worry about the world you're leaving them.
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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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A thing that happens to migrants is that they lose many of the traditional things which root identity, which root the self.
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