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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
First
Discovering
Step
Steps
Taken
Firsts

More quotes by Salman Rushdie

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When you write, you write out of your best self. Everything else drops away.
Salman Rushdie
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There's going to be no more compromise on issues where there should not be compromise. Enough with appeasement or apology and mollifying, all that. To hell with all that. I'm just going to fight my corner.
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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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From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable.
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We are the only animals that tell stories to understand the world we live in.
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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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The First Amendment defends all forms of speech including hate speech, which is why groups like Ku Klux Klan are allowed to utter their poisonous remarks.
Salman Rushdie
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All names mean something.
Salman Rushdie
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The accidents of my life have given me the ability to make stories in which different parts of the world are brought together, sometimes harmoniously, sometimes in conflict, and sometimes both - usually both. The difficulty in these stories is that if you write about everywhere you can end up writing about nowhere.
Salman Rushdie
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The mistake of the West was to put the Sauds on the throne of Saudi Arabia and give them control of the world's oil fortune, which they then used to propagate Wahhabi Islam.
Salman Rushdie
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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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I have never really thought of myself as a writer about religion. And I think one of the things that happened to me as a result of all that is that I think it did for some people, many people, obscure the kind of writer that I actually am.
Salman Rushdie
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The response of anybody interested in liberty is that we all have a say and the ability to have an argument is exactly what liberty is, even though it may never be resolved. In any authoritarian society the possessor of power dictates, and if you try and step outside he will come after you.
Salman Rushdie
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The worst, most insidious effect of censorship is that, in the end, it can deaden the imagination of the people. Where there is no debate, it is hard to go on remembering, every day, that there is a suppressed side to every argument.
Salman Rushdie
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A man is sane only to the extent that he subscribes to a previously-agreed construction of reality.
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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Our lives, our stories, flowed into one another's, were no longer our own, individual, discrete.
Salman Rushdie
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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.
Salman Rushdie
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The USA approach looks like bullying because it is.
Salman Rushdie
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I used to say, 'There is a God-shaped hole in me.' For a long time I stressed the absence, the hole. Now I find it is the shape which has become more important.
Salman Rushdie