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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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Well, we're still in the middle of it. And it doesn't show any sign of going away. And these attacks that were - that seemed so odd at the time, with Satanic Verses, because we didn't have any context for this. You know, where did that come from? It seemed to come out of nowhere.
Salman Rushdie
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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
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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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Have you noticed the physical resemblance between Imran Khan and Gaddafi? If you were making a movie of the life of Gaddafi and you wanted a slightly better-looking version of Gaddafi, you might cast Imran Khan.
Salman Rushdie
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When I was writing The Satanic Verses, if you had asked me about the phenomenon that we all now know as radical Islam, I wouldn't have had much to say. As recently as the mid-1980s, it didn't seem to be a big deal.
Salman Rushdie
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The response of anybody interested in liberty is that we all have a say and the ability to have an argument is exactly what liberty is, even though it may never be resolved. In any authoritarian society the possessor of power dictates, and if you try and step outside he will come after you.
Salman Rushdie
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It is often said by religious people that without its framework, there is no sense of right or wrong. My view is that religion comes after ethics.
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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What's real and what's true aren't necessarily the same.
Salman Rushdie
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I hate admitting that my enemies have a point.
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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If there were Israeli attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities, it makes it certain there would be a reprisal attack against the United States at some point.
Salman Rushdie
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When you're writing for the screen you're really thinking all the time of what you have to do to make sure that they have the information that they need, that the emotional thread is not snapped, that the story moves at the right speed, to keep the audience hopefully sitting on the edge of their seats or else weeping or laughing.
Salman Rushdie
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I do have a lot of time for people in my life, and friendship is a very important subject for me. I think I'm unusual among the writers I know in that respect.
Salman Rushdie
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In the cookie of life, friends are the chocolate chips.
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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You can't have modern states based on ideas which have been out of date for a thousand years.
Salman Rushdie
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Is birth always a fall?
Salman Rushdie
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She saw him fracture into rainbow colors through the prism of her love.
Salman Rushdie
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What can't be cured must be endured.
Salman Rushdie