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He had picked up languages the way most sailors pick up diseases languages were his gonorrhoea, his syphilis, his scurvy, his ague, his plague.

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
Language
Sailor
Way
Diseases
Plague
Languages
Picked
Ague
Pick
Scurvy
Picks
Syphilis
Disease
Sailors

More quotes by Salman Rushdie

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But love is what we want, not freedom. Who then is the unluckier man? The beloved, who is given his heart's desire and must for ever after fear its loss, or the free man, with his unlooked-for liberty, naked and alone between the captive armies of the earth?
Salman Rushdie
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Because I've always felt, whether the fatwa or whatever, the writer's great weapon is the truth and integrity of his voice. And as long as what you're saying is what you truly, honestly believe to be the case, then whatever the consequences, that's fine. That's an honorable position.
Salman Rushdie
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A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it or offer your own version in return.
Salman Rushdie
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You never know the answers to the questions of life until you are asked.
Salman Rushdie
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The Republicans were not always insane. They might've had politics I didn't agree with, but they weren't always actually certifiable.
Salman Rushdie
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But I - and I just think it's very - one of the problems of defending the extraordinary principle of freedom of speech is that you have to defend freedom of speech for people like that too.
Salman Rushdie
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I saw Quentin Tarantino's 'Django Unchained,' and you could say a lot of things against it, but it was incredible fun. I don't like blood and gore and I am very squeamish about violence, but Tarantino's violence is actually funny.
Salman Rushdie
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War used to be something you could stand on the nearby hill and watch. Now we have total war everybody's in it. We have total economics as well. Everything affects everybody. The Malaysian currency shakes, and people around the world are seriously affected.
Salman Rushdie
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Perhaps because my relationship with my father went through such a long, bumpy time, it's been very important for me to work to try to keep lines of communication open between my sons and myself to try to avoid my father's mistakes. At least if you're making mistakes, make different mistakes.
Salman Rushdie
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I'm a novelist. Fortunately I don't have to rule the world.
Salman Rushdie
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I'm not a very big fan of 'Slumdog Millionaire.' I think it's visually brilliant. But I have problems with the story line. I find the storyline unconvincing.
Salman Rushdie
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We all owe death a life.
Salman Rushdie
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What kind of Christmas present would Jesus ask Santa for?
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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I have been a film buff all my life and believe that the finest cinema is fully the equal of the best novels.
Salman Rushdie
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It is very, very easy not to be offended by a book. You just have to shut it.
Salman Rushdie
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One of the strange things about violent and authoritarian regimes is they don't like the glare of negative publicity.
Salman Rushdie
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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.
Salman Rushdie
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To understand just one life you have to swallow the world ... do you wonder, then, that I was a heavy child?
Salman Rushdie
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Once you get that instinct for the fictiveness, the fictionality of fiction, it kind of sets you free.
Salman Rushdie