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You don't that often see writers being sought out when there are matters of great moment to discuss. And I think that's a loss.

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
Often
Moments
Matter
Discuss
Great
Sought
Think
Matters
Thinking
Writers
Loss
Moment

More quotes by Salman Rushdie

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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.
Salman Rushdie
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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.
Salman Rushdie
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One minute you've got a lucky star watching over you and the next instant it's done a bunk.
Salman Rushdie
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We live in an age where the rate of change has been colossal. Colossal. Almost every week there's some transformation of some kind, whether technological or political or scientific, whatever. And I think it's bewildering to human beings to live in a time when they can't take anything as fixed - when everything is shifting and changing all the time.
Salman Rushdie
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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.
Salman Rushdie
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If you were standing next to the prophet on the mountain, would you have seen the archangel? And my answer to that was probably not, even though it's supposed to be a really big archangel. He describes it as - the Archangel Gabriel as standing on the horizon and filling the sky. That's a big angel.
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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If I were dead, then nobody in England would have to fuss about the cost of my security and whether or not I merited such special treatment for so long.
Salman Rushdie
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Of course, there is nothing intrinsic linking any religion with any act of violence. The crusades don't prove that Christianity was violent. The Inquisition doesn't prove that Christianity tortures people. But that Christianity did torture people.
Salman Rushdie
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What had been (at the beginning) no bigger than a full stop had expanded into a comma, a word, a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter now it was bursting into more complex developments, becoming, one might say, a book - perhaps an encylopaedia - even a whole language.
Salman Rushdie
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Sometimes great, banned works defy the censor's description and impose themselves on the world - 'Ulysses,' 'Lolita,' the 'Arabian Nights.'
Salman Rushdie
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Only the foolish, blinded by language's conventions, think of fire as red or gold. Fire is blue at it's melancholy rim, green in it's envious heart. It may burn white, or even, in it's greatest rages, black.
Salman Rushdie
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Your blasphemy, Salman, can't be forgiven. To set your words against the Words of God.
Salman Rushdie
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When you're writing for the screen you're really thinking all the time of what you have to do to make sure that they have the information that they need, that the emotional thread is not snapped, that the story moves at the right speed, to keep the audience hopefully sitting on the edge of their seats or else weeping or laughing.
Salman Rushdie
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Too many people had spent too long demonizing or totemizing me to listen seriously to what I had to say.
Salman Rushdie
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The thing that I think was very brave of my younger self was that he decided he would be an idiot. Just persevere. That feels brave to me: deciding that I'm going to damn well be this person that I've set my heart on being.
Salman Rushdie
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Not all possibilities are open to us. The world is finite our hopes spill over its rim.
Salman Rushdie
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I did a lot of student acting when I was young.
Salman Rushdie
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When I was writing The Satanic Verses, if you had asked me about the phenomenon that we all now know as radical Islam, I wouldn't have had much to say. As recently as the mid-1980s, it didn't seem to be a big deal.
Salman Rushdie
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Reading is a very different thing than performing. In fact, one of the things I think that doesn't work in books on tape is if the person doing the reading acts too much it becomes irritating to you listening to it.
Salman Rushdie