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The liveliness of literature lies in its exceptionality, in being the individual, idiosyncratic vision of one human being, in which, to our delight and great surprise, we may find our own vision reflected.

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
May
Reflected
Find
Delight
Human
Surprise
Humans
Lies
Great
Vision
Literature
Lying
Liveliness
Individual
Idiosyncratic

More quotes by Salman Rushdie

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I don't like books that play to the gallery, but I've become more concerned with telling a story as clearly and engagingly as I can.
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The glamour of being forbidden must not be underestimated.
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In the real world, immeasurable hurt is caused by terrorists based in Pakistan who attack countries like India.
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Anyone who has had the experience of going through American security checks knows the purpose of these checks is not to make you safer it's just to annoy you.
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When you write, you write out of your best self. Everything else drops away.
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This strange business of what it is to be a writer is this increasingly insane world in which we live, in which surrealism, it seems, is the new realism.
Salman Rushdie
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I stand with Charlie Hebdo, as we all must, to defend the art of satire, which has always been a force for liberty and against tyranny, dishonesty and stupidity.
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Travel was pointless. It removed you from the place in which you had a meaning, and to which you gave meaning in return by dedicating your life to it, and it spirited you away into fairylands where you were, and looked, frankly absurd.
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And so it is they who, between them, give me all the reasons for believing in none.
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If you're offended, it's your problem.
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Things, even people have a way of leaking into each other like flavours when you cook.
Salman Rushdie
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I determined to make my peace with Islam, even at the cost of my pride. Those who were surprised and displeased by what I did perhaps failed to see that ... I wanted to make peace between the warring halves of the world, which were also the warring halves of my soul.
Salman Rushdie
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Vertigo is the conflict between the fear of falling and the desire to fall.
Salman Rushdie
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The real risks for any artist are taken in pushing the work to the limits of what is possible, in the attempt to increase the sum of what it is possible to think. Books become good when they go to this edge and risk falling over it -when they endanger the artist by reason of what he has, or has not, artistically dared.
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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The only way of living in a free society is to feel that you have the right to say and do stuff.
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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.
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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
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Out-of-step intellectuals like Noam Chomsky and the deceased Edward Said have often been dismissed as crazy extremists, 'anti-American,' and in Mr. Said's case even, absurdly, as apologists for Palestinian 'terrorism.'
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Very often, people who actually pick up a book of mine for the first time are kind of surprised. And I get these letters saying, well, who knew that you were good, you know?
Salman Rushdie