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As I look back, I feel a touch of pride at my younger self's dedication to literature, which gave him the strength of mind to resist the blandishments of the enemies of promise. The sirens of ad-land sang sweetly and seductively, but I thought of Odysseus lashing himself to the mast of his ship, and somehow stayed on course.

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
Feel
Courses
Somehow
Stayed
Lashing
Feels
Course
Touch
Dedication
Odysseus
Mind
Literature
Gave
Ship
Mast
Thought
Promise
Resist
Masts
Back
Pride
Ships
Sweetly
Look
Strength
Younger
Sirens
Self
Land
Enemies
Sang
Looks
Enemy
Advertising
Ads
Blandishments

More quotes by Salman Rushdie

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I for one don't need a supreme sacred arbiter in order to be a moral being.
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I used to say, 'There is a God-shaped hole in me.' For a long time I stressed the absence, the hole. Now I find it is the shape which has become more important.
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If a birth is the fall-out from the explosion caused by the union of two unstable elements, then perhaps a half-life is all we can expect.
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It just requires so much of you, and most of the time you feel dumb.
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Dissensions between Muslim nations run at least as deep, if not deeper, than those nations' resentment of the West.
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When I'm writing a book, sentence by sentence, I'm not thinking theoretically. I'm just trying to work out the story from inside the characters I've got.
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Free societies...are societies in motion, and with motion comes tension, dissent, friction. Free people strike sparks, and those sparks are the best evidence of freedom's existence.
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Two things form the bedrock of any open society - freedom of expression and rule of law. If you don't have those things, you don't have a free country.
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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.
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As a writer, one of the things we all learned from the movies was a kind of compression that didn't exist before people were used to watching films. For instance, if you wanted to write a flashback in a novel, you once had to really contextualize it a lot, to set it up. Now, readers know exactly what you're doing. Close-ups, too.
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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.
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Writers have been in terrible situations and have yet managed to produce extraordinary work.
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If love is a yearning to be like (even to become) the beloved, then hatred, it must be said, can be engendered by the same ambition, when it cannot be fulfilled.
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We are the storytelling animal.
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I get a lot of letters - a lot of letters saying, who knew that you were funny?
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Most of what matters in your life takes place in your absence.
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Censorship is the thing that stops you doing what you want to do, and what writers want to talk about is what they do, not what stops them doing it.
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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.
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When thought becomes excessively painful, action is the finest remedy.
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Things, even people have a way of leaking into each other like flavours when you cook.
Salman Rushdie