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Censorship is the thing that stops you doing what you want to do, and what writers want to talk about is what they do, not what stops them doing it.

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
Censorship
Stops
Writers
Talk
Thing

More quotes by Salman Rushdie

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The USA approach looks like bullying because it is.
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Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts.
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As though she had entered a fable, as though she were no more than words crawling along a dry page, or as though she were becoming that page itself, that surface on which her story would be written and across which there blew a hot and merciless wind, turning her body to papyrus, her skin to parchment, her soul to paper.
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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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Sometimes I think that when people become famous, there's a public perception that they are not human beings any more. They don't have feelings they don't get hurt you can act and say as you like about them.
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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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The West should be tougher on Pakistan. It is trying to play both ends against the middle - to look like the friend of the revolutionaries on the one hand and a friend of the West in the fight against terrorism. It can't be both things.
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A man who invents himself needs someone to believe in him... Not only the need to be believed in, but the need to believe in another. You've got it: Love.
Salman Rushdie
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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.
Salman Rushdie
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Khattam-Shud,' he said slowly, 'is the Arch-Enemy of all Stories, even of language itself. He is the Prince of Silence and the Foe of Speech. And because everything ends, because dreams end, stories end, life ends, at the finish of everything we use his name. It's finished, we tell one another, it's over. Khattam-Shud: The End.
Salman Rushdie
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A man who catches History's eye is thereafter bound to a mistress from whom he will never escape.
Salman Rushdie
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Speaking as somebody with three sisters and a very largely female Muslim family, there is not a single woman I know in my family or in their friends who would have accepted the wearing of a veil.
Salman Rushdie
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Sometimes you find your voice by trying to write like people, and sometimes you find it by trying to write unlike people.
Salman Rushdie
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The rate of change is global now. I think there's a kind of mind that is so ill at ease with that transformation that it reaches out for something permanent. And religious faith offers that, from simplicities, which you are told are eternal and unchanging, and you can hold on to those like a life raft in a metamorphosing world.
Salman Rushdie
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One of the reasons my name is Rushdie is that my father was an admirer of Ibn Rush'd, the 12th century Arab philosopher known as Averroes in the West. In his time, he was making the non-literalist case for interpreting the Koran.
Salman Rushdie
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I grew up kissing books and bread.
Salman Rushdie
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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
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When thought becomes excessively painful, action is the finest remedy.
Salman Rushdie
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The way you write a screenplay is that you close your eyes and run the movie in your head and then you write it down.
Salman Rushdie
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You start at the stupid end of the book, and if you're lucky you finish at the smart end.
Salman Rushdie