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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.

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
Proud
Knowing
Funny
Family
Shameful
Stories
Belonging
Important
Embarrassing
Every
Families
Proof

More quotes by Salman Rushdie

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I've never had very high regard for therapists. I owe my health, my mental survival, to my friends and loved ones.
Salman Rushdie
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Even the Islam stuff I thought was pretty respectful about Islam in a funny way. I mean, yes, from a secular point of view, but it talks about the birth of this religion, and I thought it was pretty admiring of the person at the center of it, the prophet of Islam.
Salman Rushdie
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Meaning is a shaky edifice we build out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old fillms, small victories, people hated, people loved perhaps it is because our sense of what is the case is constructed from such inadequate materials that we defend it so fiercely, even to death.
Salman Rushdie
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You don't that often see writers being sought out when there are matters of great moment to discuss. And I think that's a loss.
Salman Rushdie
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Throughout human history, the apostles of purity, those who have claimed to possess a total explanation, have wrought havoc among mere mixed-up human beings.
Salman Rushdie
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Speaking as somebody with three sisters and a very largely female Muslim family, there is not a single woman I know in my family or in their friends who would have accepted the wearing of a veil.
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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Between shame and shamelessness lies the axis upon which we turn meteorological conditions at both these poles are of the most extreme, ferocious type. Shamelessness, shame: the roots of violence.
Salman Rushdie
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Not all possibilities are open to us. The world is finite our hopes spill over its rim.
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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I fell victim to the temptation of every autobiographer, to the illusion that since the past exists only in one's memories and the words which strive vainly to encapsulate them, it is possible to create past events simply by saying they occurred.
Salman Rushdie
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Is birth always a fall?
Salman Rushdie
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If you have children you worry about the world you're leaving them.
Salman Rushdie
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Madame Bovary and a flying carpet, they are both untrue in the same way. Somebody made them up.
Salman Rushdie
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[My work] is a love song to our mongrel selves.
Salman Rushdie
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I don't think there is a need for an entity like God in my life.
Salman Rushdie
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Human beings understand themselves and shape their futures by arguing and challenging and questioning and saying the un-sayable, not by bowing the knee whether to gods or to men.
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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Certainly, poverty and economic decline have a lot to do with the so-called rage of Islam. You've got all these young men in countries which are economically in bad shape. The idea that they might be able to make a good living and get married and have a family, a decent life, seems very remote to a lot of people in a lot of the world.
Salman Rushdie
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What I've always seen in writers and artists is the courage it takes to make an original work of art. I think the real risks in literature are linguistic and intellectual, and I hope we can highlight those, as well as political courage.
Salman Rushdie