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When you know what you're against you have taken the first step to discovering what you're for.

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
Discovering
Step
Steps
Taken
Firsts
First

More quotes by Salman Rushdie

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Children like being a little scared, but they don't want to be disturbed.
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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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There are two things in Indian history - one is the incredible optimism and potential of the place, and the other is the betrayal of that potential - for example, corruption. Those two strands intertwine through the whole of Indian history, and maybe not just Indian history.
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I will come back to India - so deal with it.
Salman Rushdie
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Khattam-Shud,' he said slowly, 'is the Arch-Enemy of all Stories, even of language itself. He is the Prince of Silence and the Foe of Speech. And because everything ends, because dreams end, stories end, life ends, at the finish of everything we use his name. It's finished, we tell one another, it's over. Khattam-Shud: The End.
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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One of the characteristics of mudslinging is that mud sticks if it's thrown with enough force for long enough.
Salman Rushdie
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The suicide bomber's imagination leads him to believe in a brilliant act of heroism, when in fact he is simply blowing himself up pointlessly and taking other people's lives.
Salman Rushdie
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Not even the visionary or mystical experience ever lasts very long. It is for art to capture that experience, to offer it to, in the case of literature, its readers to be, for a secular, materialist culture, some sort of replacement for what the love of god offers in the world of faith.
Salman Rushdie
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What's real and what's true aren't necessarily the same.
Salman Rushdie
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To see things plainly, you have to cross a frontier.
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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Something was badly amiss with the spiritual life of the planet...Too many demons inside people claiming to believe in God.
Salman Rushdie
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I always thought the front line was the bookstores. And bookstores around America, around the world did astonishingly well. They held the line. They didn't chicken out. You know, they defended the book. They kept it in the front of the store.
Salman Rushdie
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I'm no friend of Tony Blair's and I consider the Middle East policies of the United States and the UK fatal.
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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If Woody Allen were a Muslim, he'd be dead by now.
Salman Rushdie
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Some people are paralyzed by the consciousness of death, other people live with it.... The fatwa certainly made me think about it a lot more than I ever had. I guess I know I'm going to die, but then, so are you.
Salman Rushdie
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There is a widespread difficulty in the Muslim world, which has to do with how the people are taught about examining their own history. A whole range of stuff has been placed off limits.
Salman Rushdie
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The Christian Coalition is still about Christianity, even if it's an idea of Christianity that many Christians might not go along with.
Salman Rushdie