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One of the things a writer is for is to say the unsayable, speak the unspeakable and ask difficult questions.

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
Things
Unsayable
Unspeakable
Questions
Writer
Asks
Difficult
Speak
Writing

More quotes by Salman Rushdie

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If by some bizarre chance there turns out to be a god [...], I'm willing to bet he's an atheist too.
Salman Rushdie
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You can't assume if you do something contentious that people will be on your side. The moment violence enters the story, the story changes. Then the question is, How do you face up to violence? And then you have to have a no-compromise position. And this is quite simply a lesson we learn in the school playground.
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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Realism can break a writer's heart.
Salman Rushdie
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As though she had entered a fable, as though she were no more than words crawling along a dry page, or as though she were becoming that page itself, that surface on which her story would be written and across which there blew a hot and merciless wind, turning her body to papyrus, her skin to parchment, her soul to paper.
Salman Rushdie
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One of the things I know from the study of history is that history surprises you. History is not written. It's not inevitable.The victory of evil is not certain.
Salman Rushdie
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The Christian Coalition is still about Christianity, even if it's an idea of Christianity that many Christians might not go along with.
Salman Rushdie
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There needs to be a thorough examination, by Muslims everywhere, of why it is that the faith they love breeds so many violent mutant strains.
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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When thought becomes excessively painful, action is the finest remedy.
Salman Rushdie
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I am gagged and imprisoned. I can't even speak. I want to kick a football in a park with my son. Ordinary, banal life: my impossible dream.
Salman Rushdie
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If you take a look at history, you will find that the understanding of what is good and evil has always existed before the individual religions. The religions were only invented by people afterwards, in order to express this idea.
Salman Rushdie
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For many people, I've ceased to be a human being. I've become an issue, a bother, an affair.... And has it really been so long since religions persecuted people, burning them as heretics, drowning them as witches, that you can't recognize religious persecution when you see it?
Salman Rushdie
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For me, 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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Some people are paralyzed by the consciousness of death, other people live with it.... The fatwa certainly made me think about it a lot more than I ever had. I guess I know I'm going to die, but then, so are you.
Salman Rushdie
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Mo Yan is the Chinese equivalent of the Soviet Russian apparatchik writer Mikhail Sholokhov: a patsy of the regime.
Salman Rushdie
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I want to write novels. I want to write stories. I want to do the stuff that I became a writer to do.
Salman Rushdie
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So India’s problem turns out to be the world’s problem. What happened in India has happened in God’s name. The problem’s name is God.
Salman Rushdie
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I am certainly not a good Muslim. But I am able now to say that I am Muslim in fact it is a source of happiness to say that I am now inside, and a part of the community whose values have always been closest to my heart.
Salman Rushdie
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No people whose word for 'yesterday' is the same as their word for 'tomorrow' can be said to have a firm grip on the time.
Salman Rushdie