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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
Place
Privilege
Requires
Deserve
Exist
Acted
Struggle
Languages
Literature
Deserves
Language
Arena
Order
Discourse

More quotes by Salman Rushdie

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Once you put a thought into the world, it can be disagreed with, but it can't be unthought.
Salman Rushdie
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When you write you in a way write out of what you think of as your best self, the part of you that is lacking in foibles and weaknesses and egotism and vanities and so on. You're just trying to really say something as truthful as you can out of the best that you have in you.
Salman Rushdie
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I have been a film buff all my life and believe that the finest cinema is fully the equal of the best novels.
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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Speaking as somebody with three sisters and a very largely female Muslim family, there is not a single woman I know in my family or in their friends who would have accepted the wearing of a veil.
Salman Rushdie
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It doesn't matter whether characters are real people or not if they're not vivid on the page, then the reader doesn't care about them that much, and, if the reader doesn't care about them that much, then they don't care what happens to them.
Salman Rushdie
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With death comes honesty.
Salman Rushdie
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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
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If there is a choice between absolute safety and freedom, then freedom must always prevail.
Salman Rushdie
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Be sure that you go to the author to get at his meaning, not to find yours.
Salman Rushdie
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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
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This paranoid Islam, which blames outsider, 'infidels', for all the ills of Muslim societies, and whose proposed remedy is the closing of those societies to the rival project of modernity, is presently the fastest growing version of Islam in the world.
Salman Rushdie
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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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Certainly, the Hollywood cinema, there's almost nothing of interest coming out of there.
Salman Rushdie
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Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images they fight for the same territory.
Salman Rushdie
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Matthew Wiener on Mad Men writes the entire series before they start shooting, and if you have that, then what you can do with character and story is not at all unlike what you can do in a novel.
Salman Rushdie
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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
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Once you get that instinct for the fictiveness, the fictionality of fiction, it kind of sets you free.
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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Peace, perfect peace, in this dark world of sin? The Blood of Jesus whispers peace within.
Salman Rushdie