Quote

As though she had entered a fable, as though she were no more than words crawling along a dry page, or as though she were becoming that page itself, that surface on which her story would be written and across which there blew a hot and merciless wind, turning her body to papyrus, her skin to parchment, her soul to paper.

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
Soul
Wind
Page
Merciless
Would
Becoming
Skin
Fables
Written
Skins
Crawling
Though
Surface
Blew
Story
Pages
Entered
Papyrus
Words
Across
Dry
Parchment
Stories
Paper
Turning
Body
Along
Hot
Fable

More quotes by Salman Rushdie

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It's obvious that I come down on the side of free speech for anybody's work.
Salman Rushdie
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Pakistan is alarmed by the rising Indian influence in Afghanistan, and fears that an Afghanistan cleansed of the Taliban would be an Indian client state, thus sandwiching Pakistan between two hostile countries. The paranoia of Pakistan about India's supposed dark machinations should never be underestimated.
Salman Rushdie
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Such is the miraculous nature of the future of exiles: what is first uttered in the impotence of an overheated apartment becomes the fate of nations.
Salman Rushdie
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Home is the place where you feel happy.
Salman Rushdie
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It's always been colossally important to me that my books should be well received in India. It's where I come from.
Salman Rushdie
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I do think of Bombay as my hometown. Those are the streets I walked when I was learning to walk. And it's the place that my imagination has returned to more than anywhere else.
Salman Rushdie
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So India’s problem turns out to be the world’s problem. What happened in India has happened in God’s name. The problem’s name is God.
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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I discovered that if you find the language to talk to younger readers, children can accept anything.
Salman Rushdie
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A mature society understands that at the heart of democracy is argument.
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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It just requires so much of you, and most of the time you feel dumb.
Salman Rushdie
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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.
Salman Rushdie
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When I was writing The Satanic Verses, if you had asked me about the phenomenon that we all now know as radical Islam, I wouldn't have had much to say. As recently as the mid-1980s, it didn't seem to be a big deal.
Salman Rushdie
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I think it's a very important function of art to challenge accepted reality, especially when that reality is created by powerful interest groups.
Salman Rushdie
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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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To see things plainly, you have to cross a frontier.
Salman Rushdie
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For me, what I've always seen in writers and artists is the courage it takes to make an original work of art. I think the real risks in literature are linguistic and intellectual, and I hope we can highlight those, as well as political courage.
Salman Rushdie
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In the cookie of life, friends are the chocolate chips.
Salman Rushdie
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My parents gave me the gift of irreligion, of growing up without bothering to ask people what gods they held dear, assuming that in fact, like my parents, they weren't interested in gods, and that this uninterest was 'normal.' You may argue that the gift was a poisoned chalice, but even if so, that's a cup from which I'd happily drink again.
Salman Rushdie