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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
Unsayable
Things
Unspeakable
Questions
Writer
Asks
Difficult
Speak
Writing
More quotes by Salman Rushdie
The question I'm always asking myself is: are we masters or victims? Do we make history, or does history make us? Do we shape the world, or are we just shaped by it? The question of do we have agency in our lives or whether we are just passive victims of events is, I think, a great question, and one that I have always tried to ask.
Salman Rushdie
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
He had picked up languages the way most sailors pick up diseases languages were his gonorrhoea, his syphilis, his scurvy, his ague, his plague.
Salman Rushdie
Once you get that instinct for the fictiveness, the fictionality of fiction, it kind of sets you free.
Salman Rushdie
The rate of change is global now. I think there's a kind of mind that is so ill at ease with that transformation that it reaches out for something permanent. And religious faith offers that, from simplicities, which you are told are eternal and unchanging, and you can hold on to those like a life raft in a metamorphosing world.
Salman Rushdie
The writers of the French enlightenment had deliberately used blasphemy as a weapon, refusing to accept the power of the Church to set limiting points on thought.
Salman Rushdie
‘Respect for religion’ has become a code phrase meaning ‘fear of religion.’ Religions, like all other ideas, deserve criticism, satire, and, yes, our fearless disrespect.
Salman Rushdie
You can adhere to your faith, but that faith needs to march in line with the rest of the world and needs to find a way of expressing itself in the modern world.
Salman Rushdie
Liberate yourself, because no one else is going to liberate you
Salman Rushdie
Dissensions between Muslim nations run at least as deep, if not deeper, than those nations' resentment of the West.
Salman Rushdie
Certainly, poverty and economic decline have a lot to do with the so-called rage of Islam. You've got all these young men in countries which are economically in bad shape. The idea that they might be able to make a good living and get married and have a family, a decent life, seems very remote to a lot of people in a lot of the world.
Salman Rushdie
Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can't forgive.
Salman Rushdie
A man who catches History's eye is thereafter bound to a mistress from whom he will never escape.
Salman Rushdie
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.
Salman Rushdie
Rock n' roll was a kid when I was a kid.
Salman Rushdie
People are always telling me that they've seen people reading my books on the subway, or the beach, or whenever.
Salman Rushdie
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
Bread and books: food for the body and food for the soul - what could be more worthy of our respect, and even love?
Salman Rushdie
The answer to religion is not no religion, but another way of thinking of it. Another way of being in it.
Salman Rushdie
The history of life was not the bumbling progress - the very English, middle-class progress - Victorian thought had wanted it to be, but violent, a thing of dramatic, cumulative transformations: in the old formulation, more revolution than evolution.
Salman Rushdie
