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A people that has remained convinced of its greatness and invulnerability, that has chosen to believe such a myth in the face of all the evidence, is a people in the grip of a kind of sleep, or madness.

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
People
Convinced
Greatness
Evidence
Invulnerability
Sleep
Grip
Face
Remained
Faces
Myth
Kind
Madness
Believe
Chosen

More quotes by Salman Rushdie

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Reading is a very different thing than performing. In fact, one of the things I think that doesn't work in books on tape is if the person doing the reading acts too much it becomes irritating to you listening to it.
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The answer to religion is not no religion, but another way of thinking of it. Another way of being in it.
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Airport security exists to guard us against terrorist attacks.
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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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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Ideas are interesting to me, and religions are a place where ideas have been very subtly embodied for thousands of years. All literature started as sacred literature.
Salman Rushdie
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To be born again,' sang Gibreal Farishta tumbling from the heaveans, 'first you have to die. Ho ji! Ho ji! To land upon the bosomy earth, first one needs to fly Tat-taa! Takatun! How to ever smile again, if first you won't cry? How to win the darling's love mister, without a sigh?
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Realism can break a writer's heart.
Salman Rushdie
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Normally when I read, I don't like music playing.
Salman Rushdie
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It may be that the books that were best liked in your lifetime are not the ones that are best liked 100 years later.
Salman Rushdie
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I do think that there is such a thing as human nature, and that the things that we have in common are perhaps greater than the things that divide us.
Salman Rushdie
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What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist. Without the freedom to challenge, even to satirize all orthodoxies, it ceases to exist. Language and the imagination cannot be imprisoned, or art will die, and with it, a little of what makes us human.
Salman Rushdie
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If the culture shifts, if people think differently about women, the art will shift, too. You can't ask art to make social change. It's not what it's for.
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 think, in a written novel, the way in which you play with the readers' emotion or the way in which you engage the readers' emotions can be very indirect. You could come at it through irony or comedy, etcetera, and you could capture people's sympathies and feelings kind of by stealth if you like.
Salman Rushdie
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The response of anybody interested in liberty is that we all have a say and the ability to have an argument is exactly what liberty is, even though it may never be resolved. In any authoritarian society the possessor of power dictates, and if you try and step outside he will come after you.
Salman Rushdie
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I hate admitting that my enemies have a point.
Salman Rushdie
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My heart broke open and history fell in.
Salman Rushdie
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Most of what matters in your life takes place in your absence.
Salman Rushdie
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Hyperrealism can create an atmosphere of surrealism because nobody sees the world in such detail.
Salman Rushdie