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Human beings understand themselves and shape their futures by arguing and challenging and questioning and saying the un-sayable, not by bowing the knee whether to gods or to men.

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
Whether
Arguing
Understand
Knees
Human
Gods
Humans
Shape
Bowing
Men
Shapes
Futures
Beings
Knee
Challenges
Questioning
Saying
Challenging

More quotes by Salman Rushdie

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I don't think there is a need for an entity like God in my life.
Salman Rushdie
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If I were dead, then nobody in England would have to fuss about the cost of my security and whether or not I merited such special treatment for so long.
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Sometimes you find your voice by trying to write like people, and sometimes you find it by trying to write unlike people.
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Our lives are not what we deserve they are, let us agree, in many ways deficient.
Salman Rushdie
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[My work] is a love song to our mongrel selves.
Salman Rushdie
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But love is what we want, not freedom. Who then is the unluckier man? The beloved, who is given his heart's desire and must for ever after fear its loss, or the free man, with his unlooked-for liberty, naked and alone between the captive armies of the earth?
Salman Rushdie
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I saw Quentin Tarantino's 'Django Unchained,' and you could say a lot of things against it, but it was incredible fun. I don't like blood and gore and I am very squeamish about violence, but Tarantino's violence is actually funny.
Salman Rushdie
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An iceberg is water striving to be land a mountain, especially a Himalaya, especially Everest, is land's attempt to metamorphose into sky it is grounded in flight, the earth mutated--nearly--into air, and become, in the true sense, exalted. Long before she ever encountered the mountain, Allie was aware of its brooding presence in her soul.
Salman Rushdie
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If you have children you worry about the world you're leaving them.
Salman Rushdie
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I would argue that religion comes from a desire to get to the questions of, 'Where do we come from?' and 'How shall we live?' And I would say I don't need religion to answer those questions.
Salman Rushdie
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England in a way is lucky. It's an island, so the frontiers are given by the sea.
Salman Rushdie
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I have no problem with people's religious beliefs. I just don't happen to have any.
Salman Rushdie
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The history of a culture can be determined by its untranslatable words.
Salman Rushdie
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Madame Bovary and a flying carpet, they are both untrue in the same way. Somebody made them up.
Salman Rushdie
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The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas - uncertainty, progress, change - into crimes.
Salman Rushdie
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Someone asked me if I was afraid to write my memoirs. I told him: 'We have to stop drawing up accounts of fear! We live in a society in which people are allowed to tell their story, and that is what I do.'
Salman Rushdie
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I discovered that if you find the language to talk to younger readers, children can accept anything.
Salman Rushdie
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I had a very difficult relationship with my father, which ended up okay, but there were many difficult years.
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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A man is sane only to the extent that he subscribes to a previously-agreed construction of reality.
Salman Rushdie