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Originality is dangerous. It challenges, questions, overturns assumptions, unsettles moral codes.

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
Moral
Codes
Assumptions
Originality
Assumption
Code
Questions
Dangerous
Overturns
Challenges
Unsettles

More quotes by Salman Rushdie

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Very often in free speech cases you find yourself defending material that you personally detest, because of course it's no trick to defend the free speech of people you either agree with or who don't particularly upset you. It's when people really upset you that you discover if you believe in free speech or not.
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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Children like being a little scared, but they don't want to be disturbed.
Salman Rushdie
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Reading is a very different thing than performing. In fact, one of the things I think that doesn't work in books on tape is if the person doing the reading acts too much it becomes irritating to you listening to it.
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
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One of the things I've learnt is not to depend on there being a woman in your life to make it work. I love my work, I love my children, I've got wonderful friends, you know, I have a nice life.
Salman Rushdie
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I grew up falling in love with kind of story, amazing, wonder tale of the East, which if you're a child growing up in India is all around you.And I think one of the gifts it gave me as a writer was this early knowledge that stories are not true.
Salman Rushdie
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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.
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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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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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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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.
Salman Rushdie
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I grew up in a family in which there was very little religion. My father wasn't religious at all. But he was really interested in the subject of, you know, the birth and growth of Islam. And he basically transmitted that interest to me.
Salman Rushdie
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I always thought the front line was the bookstores. And bookstores around America, around the world did astonishingly well. They held the line. They didn't chicken out. You know, they defended the book. They kept it in the front of the store.
Salman Rushdie
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But I - and I just think it's very - one of the problems of defending the extraordinary principle of freedom of speech is that you have to defend freedom of speech for people like that too.
Salman Rushdie
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The sixty-minute drama form has become very rich.
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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Certainly, the Hollywood cinema, there's almost nothing of interest coming out of there.
Salman Rushdie
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This strange business of what it is to be a writer is this increasingly insane world in which we live, in which surrealism, it seems, is the new realism.
Salman Rushdie
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The suicide bomber's imagination leads him to believe in a brilliant act of heroism, when in fact he is simply blowing himself up pointlessly and taking other people's lives.
Salman Rushdie