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

More quotes by Salman Rushdie

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Live on, survive, for the earth gives forth wonders. It may swallow your heart, but the wonders keep on coming. You stand before them bareheaded, shriven. What is expected of you is attention.
Salman Rushdie
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Hell is other people's fantasies.
Salman Rushdie
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The history of life was not the bumbling progress - the very English, middle-class progress - Victorian thought had wanted it to be, but violent, a thing of dramatic, cumulative transformations: in the old formulation, more revolution than evolution.
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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Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images they fight for the same territory.
Salman Rushdie
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To be born again,' sang Gibreal Farishta tumbling from the heaveans, 'first you have to die. Ho ji! Ho ji! To land upon the bosomy earth, first one needs to fly Tat-taa! Takatun! How to ever smile again, if first you won't cry? How to win the darling's love mister, without a sigh?
Salman Rushdie
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That's the trouble with you sad-city types: a place has to be miserable and dull as ditchwater before you believe it's real.
Salman Rushdie
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One of the strange things about violent and authoritarian regimes is they don't like the glare of negative publicity.
Salman Rushdie
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When thought becomes excessively painful, action is the finest remedy.
Salman Rushdie
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You want all your books to stick around after you've gone.
Salman Rushdie
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The PEN/Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to Write Award is a way of spotlighting individual cases. If you look at the history of the award, the freedom rate is very high: a very high percentage of people who receive those awards are freed in the next six months to a year. The only weapon there is attention, but interestingly it works.
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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One either loves, or waits for love, or banishes love for good. That is the full range of possible choices.
Salman Rushdie
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If there is a choice between absolute safety and freedom, then freedom must always prevail.
Salman Rushdie
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Sometimes when you finish a book, you don't know quite what you've got.
Salman Rushdie
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The First Amendment defends all forms of speech including hate speech, which is why groups like Ku Klux Klan are allowed to utter their poisonous remarks.
Salman Rushdie
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When you know what you're against you have taken the first step to discovering what you're for.
Salman Rushdie
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I think, in a written novel, the way in which you play with the readers' emotion or the way in which you engage the readers' emotions can be very indirect. You could come at it through irony or comedy, etcetera, and you could capture people's sympathies and feelings kind of by stealth if you like.
Salman Rushdie
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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.
Salman Rushdie
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I want to write novels. I want to write stories. I want to do the stuff that I became a writer to do.
Salman Rushdie