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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
Literature
Deserves
Language
Arena
Order
Discourse
Place
Privilege
Requires
Deserve
Exist
Acted
Struggle
Languages
More quotes by Salman Rushdie
Nobody wants to read a 600 page book in which the author is fabulous throughout.
Salman Rushdie
I think, in a written novel, the way in which you play with the readers' emotion or the way in which you engage the readers' emotions can be very indirect. You could come at it through irony or comedy, etcetera, and you could capture people's sympathies and feelings kind of by stealth if you like.
Salman Rushdie
Once you put a thought into the world, it can be disagreed with, but it can't be unthought.
Salman Rushdie
I don't read my books, I write them. Once I've finished the many years it usually takes me to write them, I can't bear to read them, because I've spent too long with them already. I'm not advertising them very well, am I?
Salman Rushdie
Normally when I read, I don't like music playing.
Salman Rushdie
Ignorantly is how we all fall in love for it is a kind of fall. Closing our eyes, we leap from that cliff in hope of a soft landing. Nor is it always soft but still, without that leap nobody comes to life.
Salman Rushdie
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
People are always telling me that they've seen people reading my books on the subway, or the beach, or whenever.
Salman Rushdie
I do not read the works of Salman Rushdie, I write them. By the time I have finished writing them all I can think of is never reading them again. It's so deep, your involvement with a book, that once it's finished, then you are really done with it.
Salman Rushdie
I don't dictate to anyone what to believe and what not to. And I don't want that to be dictated to me either.
Salman Rushdie
One of the reasons my name is Rushdie is that my father was an admirer of Ibn Rush'd, the 12th century Arab philosopher known as Averroes in the West. In his time, he was making the non-literalist case for interpreting the Koran.
Salman Rushdie
A figure of speech is a shifty thing it can be twisted or it can be straight.
Salman Rushdie
The question I'm always asking myself is: are we masters or victims? Do we make history, or does history make us? Do we shape the world, or are we just shaped by it? The question of do we have agency in our lives or whether we are just passive victims of events is, I think, a great question, and one that I have always tried to ask.
Salman Rushdie
I don't think people cry reading 'Midnight's Children,' but a lot of people seem to cry watching the movie.
Salman Rushdie
Madame Bovary and a flying carpet, they are both untrue in the same way. Somebody made them up.
Salman Rushdie
Once you get that instinct for the fictiveness, the fictionality of fiction, it kind of sets you free.
Salman Rushdie
My heart broke open and history fell in.
Salman Rushdie
There needs to be a thorough examination, by Muslims everywhere, of why it is that the faith they love breeds so many violent mutant strains.
Salman Rushdie
I didn't become a writer to write about me.
Salman Rushdie
I grew up falling in love with kind of story, amazing, wonder tale of the East, which if you're a child growing up in India is all around you.And I think one of the gifts it gave me as a writer was this early knowledge that stories are not true.
Salman Rushdie