Quote

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

More quotes by 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
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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.
Salman Rushdie
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I saw Quentin Tarantino's 'Django Unchained,' and you could say a lot of things against it, but it was incredible fun. I don't like blood and gore and I am very squeamish about violence, but Tarantino's violence is actually funny.
Salman Rushdie
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Life is elsewhere. Cross frontiers. Fly away.
Salman Rushdie
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To understand just one life you have to swallow the world ... do you wonder, then, that I was a heavy child?
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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Doubt, it seems to me, is the central condition of a human being in the twentieth century.
Salman Rushdie
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We live in an age where the rate of change has been colossal. Colossal. Almost every week there's some transformation of some kind, whether technological or political or scientific, whatever. And I think it's bewildering to human beings to live in a time when they can't take anything as fixed - when everything is shifting and changing all the time.
Salman Rushdie
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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.
Salman Rushdie
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Originality is dangerous. It challenges, questions, overturns assumptions, unsettles moral codes.
Salman Rushdie
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I needed my stuff around me, and in that little cocoon I felt good, and I could work.
Salman Rushdie
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One of the things I've learnt is not to depend on there being a woman in your life to make it work. I love my work, I love my children, I've got wonderful friends, you know, I have a nice life.
Salman Rushdie
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Sometimes I think that when people become famous, there's a public perception that they are not human beings any more. They don't have feelings they don't get hurt you can act and say as you like about them.
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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If there is a choice between absolute safety and freedom, then freedom must always prevail.
Salman Rushdie
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My parents gave me the gift of irreligion, of growing up without bothering to ask people what gods they held dear, assuming that in fact, like my parents, they weren't interested in gods, and that this uninterest was 'normal.' You may argue that the gift was a poisoned chalice, but even if so, that's a cup from which I'd happily drink again.
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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I have no problem with people's religious beliefs. I just don't happen to have any.
Salman Rushdie
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An iceberg is water striving to be land a mountain, especially a Himalaya, especially Everest, is land's attempt to metamorphose into sky it is grounded in flight, the earth mutated--nearly--into air, and become, in the true sense, exalted. Long before she ever encountered the mountain, Allie was aware of its brooding presence in her soul.
Salman Rushdie
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If the creative artist worries if he will still be free tomorrow, then he will not be free today.
Salman Rushdie