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Two things form the bedrock of any open society - freedom of expression and rule of law. If you don't have those things, you don't have a free country.

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
Form
Rule
Country
Expression
Things
Open
Law
Society
Freedom
Free
Two
Bedrock

More quotes by Salman Rushdie

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I don't know what to say about literary critics. I think it's probably best to say nothing.
Salman Rushdie
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As a writer, one of the things we all learned from the movies was a kind of compression that didn't exist before people were used to watching films. For instance, if you wanted to write a flashback in a novel, you once had to really contextualize it a lot, to set it up. Now, readers know exactly what you're doing. Close-ups, too.
Salman Rushdie
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Hyperrealism can create an atmosphere of surrealism because nobody sees the world in such detail.
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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I always thought the front line was the bookstores. And bookstores around America, around the world did astonishingly well. They held the line. They didn't chicken out. You know, they defended the book. They kept it in the front of the store.
Salman Rushdie
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I do not read the works of Salman Rushdie, I write them. By the time I have finished writing them all I can think of is never reading them again. It's so deep, your involvement with a book, that once it's finished, then you are really done with it.
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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I am certainly not a good Muslim. But I am able now to say that I am Muslim in fact it is a source of happiness to say that I am now inside, and a part of the community whose values have always been closest to my heart.
Salman Rushdie
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It is commonly and, I believe, accurately said of Pakistan that her women are much more impressive than her men.
Salman Rushdie
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I grew up falling in love with kind of story, amazing, wonder tale of the East, which if you're a child growing up in India is all around you.And I think one of the gifts it gave me as a writer was this early knowledge that stories are not true.
Salman Rushdie
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With death comes honesty.
Salman Rushdie
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You start at the stupid end of the book, and if you're lucky you finish at the smart end.
Salman Rushdie
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In the real world, immeasurable hurt is caused by terrorists based in Pakistan who attack countries like India.
Salman Rushdie
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At the height of the British Empire very few English novels were written that dealt with British power. It's extraordinary that at the moment in which England was the global superpower the subject of British power appeared not to interest most writers.
Salman Rushdie
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Everything has shape, if you look for it. There is no escape from form.
Salman Rushdie
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I want more than what I want. (Vina Apsara)
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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The PEN/Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to Write Award is a way of spotlighting individual cases. If you look at the history of the award, the freedom rate is very high: a very high percentage of people who receive those awards are freed in the next six months to a year. The only weapon there is attention, but interestingly it works.
Salman Rushdie
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It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity.
Salman Rushdie
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One of the things a writer is for is to say the unsayable, speak the unspeakable and ask difficult questions.
Salman Rushdie