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The only privilege literature deserves - and this privilege it requires in order to exist - is the privilege of being in the arena of discourse, the place where the struggle of our languages can be acted out.
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
Exist
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Struggle
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Literature
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Language
Arena
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Deserve
More quotes by Salman Rushdie
I think anyone who knows me at all knows that I have been a movie addict all my life. I grew up in a city obsessed by cinema and where there are cinemas on every street corner.
Salman Rushdie
Bin Laden was born filthy rich and died in a rich man's house, which he had painstakingly built to the highest specifications.
Salman Rushdie
Well, we're still in the middle of it. And it doesn't show any sign of going away. And these attacks that were - that seemed so odd at the time, with Satanic Verses, because we didn't have any context for this. You know, where did that come from? It seemed to come out of nowhere.
Salman Rushdie
One of the things I know from the study of history is that history surprises you. History is not written. It's not inevitable.The victory of evil is not certain.
Salman Rushdie
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
India is my kid sister.
Salman Rushdie
Islam is unusual in that it's the only one of the great world religions which was born inside recorded history. That there's an enormous amount of factual historical record about the life of a prophet and about social conditions in Arabia at that time. So it's possible to look at the origin of Islam in a scholarly way.
Salman Rushdie
I write books I'd enjoy reading, I'm the reader standing behind my shoulder.
Salman Rushdie
Human beings, you see, do absolutely two primary things. We see like and unlike. Like becomes, in literature, simile and metaphor. Unlike becomes uniqueness and difference, from which I believe, the novel is born.
Salman Rushdie
It may be that the books that were best liked in your lifetime are not the ones that are best liked 100 years later.
Salman Rushdie
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
Bread and books: food for the body and food for the soul - what could be more worthy of our respect, and even love?
Salman Rushdie
A man is sane only to the extent that he subscribes to a previously-agreed construction of reality.
Salman Rushdie
People would come and threaten them. And they would respond by putting the book in the window. Behind that, the publishers, many of whom were menaced and receiving anonymous phone calls of the very menacing kind and so, almost everybody - not everybody, but almost everybody held the line.
Salman Rushdie
The rate of change is global now. I think there's a kind of mind that is so ill at ease with that transformation that it reaches out for something permanent. And religious faith offers that, from simplicities, which you are told are eternal and unchanging, and you can hold on to those like a life raft in a metamorphosing world.
Salman Rushdie
I grew up kissing books and bread.
Salman Rushdie
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
Home is the place where you feel happy.
Salman Rushdie
Things, even people have a way of leaking into each other like flavours when you cook.
Salman Rushdie
Many of us didn't believe in the image of bin Laden as a wandering Old Man of the Mountains, living on plants and insects in an inhospitable cave somewhere on the porous Pakistan-Afghan border.
Salman Rushdie
