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I used to say, 'There is a God-shaped hole in me.' For a long time I stressed the absence, the hole. Now I find it is the shape which has become more important.

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
Absence
Time
God
Shapes
Become
Stressed
Used
Shaped
Hole
Find
Holes
Important
Shape
Long

More quotes by Salman Rushdie

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We must conclude that it is not only a particular political ideology that has failed, but the idea that men and women could ever define themselves in terms that exclude their spiritual needs.
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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.
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It is often said by religious people that without its framework, there is no sense of right or wrong. My view is that religion comes after ethics.
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No people whose word for 'yesterday' is the same as their word for 'tomorrow' can be said to have a firm grip on the time.
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In the real world, immeasurable hurt is caused by terrorists based in Pakistan who attack countries like India.
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I hate admitting that my enemies have a point.
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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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But I - and I just think it's very - one of the problems of defending the extraordinary principle of freedom of speech is that you have to defend freedom of speech for people like that too.
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Unfortunately, the problem of the free speech argument is that you have to defend people you can't stand.
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I grew up in a family in which there was very little religion. My father wasn't religious at all. But he was really interested in the subject of, you know, the birth and growth of Islam. And he basically transmitted that interest to me.
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Human beings, you see, do absolutely two primary things. We see like and unlike. Like becomes, in literature, simile and metaphor. Unlike becomes uniqueness and difference, from which I believe, the novel is born.
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War used to be something you could stand on the nearby hill and watch. Now we have total war everybody's in it. We have total economics as well. Everything affects everybody. The Malaysian currency shakes, and people around the world are seriously affected.
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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.
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There is nothing like a War for the reinvention of lives.
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Our lives, our stories, flowed into one another's, were no longer our own, individual, discrete.
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I think it's a very important function of art to challenge accepted reality, especially when that reality is created by powerful interest groups.
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Bread and books: food for the body and food for the soul - what could be more worthy of our respect, and even love?
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There is no magic on earth strong enough to wipe out the legacies of one's parents.
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It seems that the right of freedom of speech that was enshrined in numerous constitutions is now under attack by religious institutions.
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I'm a novelist. Fortunately I don't have to rule the world.
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