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

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In the end, you write the book that grabs you by the throat and demands to be written.
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It's a terrible thing that your life turns into a good story.
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I don't think I've ever quite grown out of it, actually. There was a point where I could recite some of those Elvish verses - which I've mercifully forgotten. But I can still, if really pushed, recite the text of the inside of the ruling ring in the language of Mordor.
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I don't dictate to anyone what to believe and what not to. And I don't want that to be dictated to me either.
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Our lives, our stories, flowed into one another's, were no longer our own, individual, discrete.
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Fundamentalists of all faiths are the fundamental evil of our time.
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Vertigo is the conflict between the fear of falling and the desire to fall.
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You can't judge an internal injury by the size of the hole.
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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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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.
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A novel, I think, is partly about the contemporary and partly about the eternal, and it's the balance of that that's difficult to achieve.
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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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I know who I am, I know what I'm for, and I know what I'm willing to fight for.
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He had picked up languages the way most sailors pick up diseases languages were his gonorrhoea, his syphilis, his scurvy, his ague, his plague.
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There needs to be a thorough examination, by Muslims everywhere, of why it is that the faith they love breeds so many violent mutant strains.
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I do not need the idea of God to explain the world I live in.
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I saw Quentin Tarantino's 'Django Unchained,' and you could say a lot of things against it, but it was incredible fun. I don't like blood and gore and I am very squeamish about violence, but Tarantino's violence is actually funny.
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Originality is dangerous. It challenges, questions, overturns assumptions, unsettles moral codes.
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American literature has always been immigrant.
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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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