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The Chinese are good at repression and can be pretty ruthless about 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
Pretty
Good
Repression
Ruthless
Chinese

More quotes by 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.
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Free societies...are societies in motion, and with motion comes tension, dissent, friction. Free people strike sparks, and those sparks are the best evidence of freedom's existence.
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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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Once you get that instinct for the fictiveness, the fictionality of fiction, it kind of sets you free.
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Wherever goodness lay, it did not lie in ritual, unthinking obeisance before a deity but rather, perhaps, in the slow clumsy, error-strewn working out of an individual or collective path.
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Anyone who has had the experience of going through American security checks knows the purpose of these checks is not to make you safer it's just to annoy you.
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If the creative artist worries if he will still be free tomorrow, then he will not be free today.
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Meaning is a shaky edifice we build out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old fillms, small victories, people hated, people loved perhaps it is because our sense of what is the case is constructed from such inadequate materials that we defend it so fiercely, even to death.
Salman Rushdie
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Islam is unusual in that it's the only one of the great world religions which was born inside recorded history. That there's an enormous amount of factual historical record about the life of a prophet and about social conditions in Arabia at that time. So it's possible to look at the origin of Islam in a scholarly way.
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If Woody Allen were a Muslim, he'd be dead by now.
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thought I was doing two things. One is inquiring into the phenomenon of revelation, if you are not a religious person. But, clearly, it's a sincere phenomenon.
Salman Rushdie
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Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.
Salman Rushdie
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Writers have been in terrible situations and have yet managed to produce extraordinary work.
Salman Rushdie
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I had a very difficult relationship with my father, which ended up okay, but there were many difficult years.
Salman Rushdie
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What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist. Without the freedom to challenge, even to satirize all orthodoxies, it ceases to exist. Language and the imagination cannot be imprisoned, or art will die, and with it, a little of what makes us human.
Salman Rushdie
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One of the things a writer is for is to say the unsayable, speak the unspeakable and ask difficult questions.
Salman Rushdie
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Make as much racket as you like people. Noise is life and an excess of noise is a sign that life is good. There will be time for us all to be quiet when we are safely dead.
Salman Rushdie
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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.
Salman Rushdie
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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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A sigh isn't just a sigh. We inhale the world and breathe out meaning. While we can. While we can.
Salman Rushdie