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History could claw upward as well as down. The powerful could be deafened by the cries of the poor.

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
Well
Claws
Upward
Cries
Cry
Powerful
Poor
History
Deafened
Wells
Claw

More quotes by Salman Rushdie

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It just requires so much of you, and most of the time you feel dumb.
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The real risks for any artist are taken in pushing the work to the limits of what is possible, in the attempt to increase the sum of what it is possible to think. Books become good when they go to this edge and risk falling over it -when they endanger the artist by reason of what he has, or has not, artistically dared.
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Free societies...are societies in motion, and with motion comes tension, dissent, friction. Free people strike sparks, and those sparks are the best evidence of freedom's existence.
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I don't think I've ever quite grown out of it, actually. There was a point where I could recite some of those Elvish verses - which I've mercifully forgotten. But I can still, if really pushed, recite the text of the inside of the ruling ring in the language of Mordor.
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In this world without quiet corners, there can be no easy escapes from history, from hullabaloo, from terrible, unquiet fuss.
Salman Rushdie
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Vertigo is the conflict between the fear of falling and the desire to fall.
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Free societies are societies in motion, and with motion comes friction.
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India, the new myth--a collective fiction in which anything was possible, a fable rivalled only by the two other mighty fantasies: money and God.
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Now I know what a ghost is. Unfinished business, that's what.
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Be sure that you go to the author to get at his meaning, not to find yours.
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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 a birth is the fall-out from the explosion caused by the union of two unstable elements, then perhaps a half-life is all we can expect.
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If my child had prejudice in his head, I'd be ashamed. I would see it as my failure as a parent.
Salman Rushdie
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I don't dictate to anyone what to believe and what not to. And I don't want that to be dictated to me either.
Salman Rushdie
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The liveliness of literature lies in its exceptionality, in being the individual, idiosyncratic vision of one human being, in which, to our delight and great surprise, we may find our own vision reflected.
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I do think there was a period there when my sanity was under intense pressure, and I didn't know what to say or do or how to act. I was literally living from day to day.
Salman Rushdie
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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.
Salman Rushdie
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I don't read my books, I write them. Once I've finished the many years it usually takes me to write them, I can't bear to read them, because I've spent too long with them already. I'm not advertising them very well, am I?
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Very often in free speech cases you find yourself defending material that you personally detest, because of course it's no trick to defend the free speech of people you either agree with or who don't particularly upset you. It's when people really upset you that you discover if you believe in free speech or not.
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There is nothing like a War for the reinvention of lives.
Salman Rushdie