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Someone asked me if I was afraid to write my memoirs. I told him: 'We have to stop drawing up accounts of fear! We live in a society in which people are allowed to tell their story, and that is what I do.'

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
Tell
Asked
Someone
Afraid
Stories
Told
Live
Stop
Memoirs
Writing
Story
Memoir
People
Society
Allowed
Fear
Accounts
Write
Drawing

More quotes by 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.
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Stories in families are colossally important. Every family has stories: some funny, some proud, some embarrassing, some shameful. Knowing them is proof of belonging to the family.
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I've never rejected the world I came from. To be rejected by it is horrible.
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Everybody loves 'The Wire,' and I think it's okay, but in the end it's just a police series.
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[My work] is a love song to our mongrel selves.
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If I were asked for a one-sentence sound bite on religion, I would say I was against it.
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Something was badly amiss with the spiritual life of the planet...Too many demons inside people claiming to believe in God.
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I have been a film buff all my life and believe that the finest cinema is fully the equal of the best novels.
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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.
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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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Normally when I read, I don't like music playing.
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I don't like books that play to the gallery, but I've become more concerned with telling a story as clearly and engagingly as I can.
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It's obvious that I come down on the side of free speech for anybody's work.
Salman Rushdie
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A novel, I think, is partly about the contemporary and partly about the eternal, and it's the balance of that that's difficult to achieve.
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Everything has shape, if you look for it. There is no escape from form.
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If the culture shifts, if people think differently about women, the art will shift, too. You can't ask art to make social change. It's not what it's for.
Salman Rushdie
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I was 21 in 1968, so I'm as much a child of the '60s as is possible to be. In those years the subject of religion had really almost disappeared the idea that religion was going to be a major force in the life of our societies, in the West anyway, would have seemed absurd in 1968.
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Happy endings must come at the end of something,' the Walrus pointed out. 'If they happen in the middle of a story, or an adventure, or the like, all they do is cheer things up for awhile.
Salman Rushdie
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People must be protected from prejudice against their person. But people cannot be protected from prejudice against their ideas - because otherwise we're all done.
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