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Not even the visionary or mystical experience ever lasts very long. It is for art to capture that experience, to offer it to, in the case of literature, its readers to be, for a secular, materialist culture, some sort of replacement for what the love of god offers in the world of faith.

Salman Rushdie

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Salman Rushdie
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: June 19
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More quotes by Salman Rushdie

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I'm no friend of Tony Blair's and I consider the Middle East policies of the United States and the UK fatal.
Salman Rushdie
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So when I studied history at Cambridge, I did a special subject in that, exactly that. And then actually that - while I was studying it was where I came across the so-called incident of the satanic verses.
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We must conclude that it is not only a particular political ideology that has failed, but the idea that men and women could ever define themselves in terms that exclude their spiritual needs.
Salman Rushdie
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What happened in Pakistan was that people were told: You're all Muslim, so now you're a country. As we saw in 1971 with the Bangladesh secession, the answer to that was: 'Oh no, we're not.'
Salman Rushdie
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What can't be cured must be endured.
Salman Rushdie
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A novel, I think, is partly about the contemporary and partly about the eternal, and it's the balance of that that's difficult to achieve.
Salman Rushdie
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I for one don't need a supreme sacred arbiter in order to be a moral being.
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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I did a lot of student acting when I was young.
Salman Rushdie
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I do not need the idea of God to explain the world I live in.
Salman Rushdie
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I am clearly vulnerable to these more passionate and volatile unstable relationships. I am trying to not be so vulnerable.
Salman Rushdie
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My grandmother was very fierce and gruff. She was quite small, but she was very wide.
Salman Rushdie
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Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can't forgive.
Salman Rushdie
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I don't think people cry reading 'Midnight's Children,' but a lot of people seem to cry watching the movie.
Salman Rushdie
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A man who invents himself needs someone to believe in him... Not only the need to be believed in, but the need to believe in another. You've got it: Love.
Salman Rushdie
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What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist. Without the freedom to challenge, even to satirize all orthodoxies, it ceases to exist. Language and the imagination cannot be imprisoned, or art will die, and with it, a little of what makes us human.
Salman Rushdie
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And using that - the birth of a religion, it suggests that you have got two tests. You have the test of weakness. When you're weak, do you compromise, do you bend, do you give in, do you accommodate? And then the test of strength. When you're strong, are you merciful, are you generous, or are you cruel?
Salman Rushdie
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We are the storytelling animal.
Salman Rushdie
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If I were asked for a one-sentence sound bite on religion, I would say I was against it.
Salman Rushdie
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I'm not a prophet, but I always thought it was natural for dictatorships to fall. I remember in 1989, two months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, had you said it was going to happen no one would have believed you. The system seemed powerful and unbreakable. Suddenly overnight it blew away like dust.
Salman Rushdie