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If you take a look at history, you will find that the understanding of what is good and evil has always existed before the individual religions. The religions were only invented by people afterwards, in order to express this idea.

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
Existed
Always
History
Religions
People
Order
Invented
Ideas
Find
Express
Look
Understanding
Looks
Evil
Take
Idea
Afterwards
Good
Individual

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When I'm writing a book, sentence by sentence, I'm not thinking theoretically. I'm just trying to work out the story from inside the characters I've got.
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Things, even people have a way of leaking into each other like flavours when you cook.
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If my child had prejudice in his head, I'd be ashamed. I would see it as my failure as a parent.
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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.
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I have never really thought of myself as a writer about religion. And I think one of the things that happened to me as a result of all that is that I think it did for some people, many people, obscure the kind of writer that I actually am.
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There is a widespread difficulty in the Muslim world, which has to do with how the people are taught about examining their own history. A whole range of stuff has been placed off limits.
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Don't you know girls have to fool people every day of their lives if they want to get anywhere?
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In the cookie of life, friends are the chocolate chips.
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There are two things in Indian history - one is the incredible optimism and potential of the place, and the other is the betrayal of that potential - for example, corruption. Those two strands intertwine through the whole of Indian history, and maybe not just Indian history.
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It doesn't matter whether characters are real people or not if they're not vivid on the page, then the reader doesn't care about them that much, and, if the reader doesn't care about them that much, then they don't care what happens to them.
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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.
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If by some bizarre chance there turns out to be a god [...], I'm willing to bet he's an atheist too.
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Very often, people who actually pick up a book of mine for the first time are kind of surprised. And I get these letters saying, well, who knew that you were good, you know?
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I discovered that if you find the language to talk to younger readers, children can accept anything.
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How to forgive the world for its beauty, which merely disguises its ugliness for its gentleness, which merely cloaks its cruelty for its illusion of continuity, seamlessly, as the night follows the day, so to speak- whereas in reality life is a series of brutal raptures, falling upon your defenseless hands, like the blows of a woodman's axe?
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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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If you have children you worry about the world you're leaving them.
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The Christian Coalition is still about Christianity, even if it's an idea of Christianity that many Christians might not go along with.
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I'm a reader of Chinese literature, I like their films, but also: I've had great difficulty getting my work published in China very little of it has been published there. The first two attempts to have all of my work published, for instance, were refused without any reason ever being given.
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