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optimism is a disease

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
Optimism
Disease

More quotes by Salman Rushdie

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I stand with Charlie Hebdo, as we all must, to defend the art of satire.
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I'm a world expert on superhero comics. I think maybe only Michael Chabon knows more than me.
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What happened in Pakistan was that people were told: You're all Muslim, so now you're a country. As we saw in 1971 with the Bangladesh secession, the answer to that was: 'Oh no, we're not.'
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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.
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As I look back, I feel a touch of pride at my younger self's dedication to literature, which gave him the strength of mind to resist the blandishments of the enemies of promise. The sirens of ad-land sang sweetly and seductively, but I thought of Odysseus lashing himself to the mast of his ship, and somehow stayed on course.
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Originality is dangerous. It challenges, questions, overturns assumptions, unsettles moral codes.
Salman Rushdie
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Unfortunately, the problem of the free speech argument is that you have to defend people you can't stand.
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Airport security exists to guard us against terrorist attacks.
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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.
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Too many people had spent too long demonizing or totemizing me to listen seriously to what I had to say.
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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Life is lived forward but is judged in reverse.
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Things, even people have a way of leaking into each other like flavours when you cook.
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Now I know what a ghost is. Unfinished business, that's what.
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One of the things I've thought about 'Midnight's Children' is that it is a novel which puts a Muslim family at the centre of the Indian experience.
Salman Rushdie
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I've never rejected the world I came from. To be rejected by it is horrible.
Salman Rushdie
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Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images they fight for the same territory.
Salman Rushdie
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You want all your books to stick around after you've gone.
Salman Rushdie
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You can't assume if you do something contentious that people will be on your side. The moment violence enters the story, the story changes. Then the question is, How do you face up to violence? And then you have to have a no-compromise position. And this is quite simply a lesson we learn in the school playground.
Salman Rushdie
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When you write, you write out of your best self. Everything else drops away.
Salman Rushdie