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I don't read my books, I write them. Once I've finished the many years it usually takes me to write them, I can't bear to read them, because I've spent too long with them already. I'm not advertising them very well, am I?

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
Wells
Spent
Book
Bears
Well
Usually
Many
Already
Writing
Takes
Long
Books
Advertising
Years
Read
Bear
Write
Finished

More quotes by Salman Rushdie

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Censorship is the thing that stops you doing what you want to do, and what writers want to talk about is what they do, not what stops them doing it.
Salman Rushdie
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A man is sane only to the extent that he subscribes to a previously-agreed construction of reality.
Salman Rushdie
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People are always telling me that they've seen people reading my books on the subway, or the beach, or whenever.
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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We have come to think of taking offence as a fundamental right. We value very little more highly than our rage, which gives us, in our opinion, the moral high ground. From there we can shoot down at our enemies and inflict heavy fatalities.
Salman Rushdie
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Because I've always felt, whether the fatwa or whatever, the writer's great weapon is the truth and integrity of his voice. And as long as what you're saying is what you truly, honestly believe to be the case, then whatever the consequences, that's fine. That's an honorable position.
Salman Rushdie
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And using that - the birth of a religion, it suggests that you have got two tests. You have the test of weakness. When you're weak, do you compromise, do you bend, do you give in, do you accommodate? And then the test of strength. When you're strong, are you merciful, are you generous, or are you cruel?
Salman Rushdie
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‘Respect for religion’ has become a code phrase meaning ‘fear of religion.’ Religions, like all other ideas, deserve criticism, satire, and, yes, our fearless disrespect.
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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Certainly, the Hollywood cinema, there's almost nothing of interest coming out of there.
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.
Salman Rushdie
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But there's one thing we must all be clear about: terrorism is not the pursuit of legitimate goals by some sort of illegitimate means. Whatever the murderers may be trying to achieve, creating a better world certainly isn't one of their goals. Instead they are out to murder innocent people.
Salman Rushdie
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I think people direct good films when they feel personal to them, not because it's a famous book or something. It has to something move over that and somehow become personal to the director.
Salman Rushdie
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The question I'm always asking myself is: are we masters or victims? Do we make history, or does history make us? Do we shape the world, or are we just shaped by it? The question of do we have agency in our lives or whether we are just passive victims of events is, I think, a great question, and one that I have always tried to ask.
Salman Rushdie
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The time-honored role of the artist [is] to speak truth to power.
Salman Rushdie
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They lived in a great city, a metropolis of many narratives that converged briefly and then separated for ever, discovering their different dooms in that crowd of stories through which all of us, following our own destinies, had to push and shove to find our way through, or out.
Salman Rushdie
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One of the things I've thought about 'Midnight's Children' is that it is a novel which puts a Muslim family at the centre of the Indian experience.
Salman Rushdie
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When you write, you write out of your best self. Everything else drops away.
Salman Rushdie
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She saw him fracture into rainbow colors through the prism of her love.
Salman Rushdie
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I'm not a prophet, but I always thought it was natural for dictatorships to fall. I remember in 1989, two months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, had you said it was going to happen no one would have believed you. The system seemed powerful and unbreakable. Suddenly overnight it blew away like dust.
Salman Rushdie