Quote

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.

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
Work
Taken
Attempt
Good
Reading
Edges
Think
Fall
Falling
Endanger
Thinking
Artist
Increase
Artistically
Become
Limits
Dared
Reason
Risk
Risks
Book
Books
Edge
Real
Possible
Pushing

More quotes by Salman Rushdie

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Islam is unusual in that it's the only one of the great world religions which was born inside recorded history. That there's an enormous amount of factual historical record about the life of a prophet and about social conditions in Arabia at that time. So it's possible to look at the origin of Islam in a scholarly way.
Salman Rushdie
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What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.
Salman Rushdie
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We have come to think of taking offence as a fundamental right. We value very little more highly than our rage, which gives us, in our opinion, the moral high ground. From there we can shoot down at our enemies and inflict heavy fatalities.
Salman Rushdie
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Live on, survive, for the earth gives forth wonders. It may swallow your heart, but the wonders keep on coming. You stand before them bareheaded, shriven. What is expected of you is attention.
Salman Rushdie
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War used to be something you could stand on the nearby hill and watch. Now we have total war everybody's in it. We have total economics as well. Everything affects everybody. The Malaysian currency shakes, and people around the world are seriously affected.
Salman Rushdie
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I seem to have fallen for women with missing parents. Goodness knows what it signifies.
Salman Rushdie
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Travel was pointless. It removed you from the place in which you had a meaning, and to which you gave meaning in return by dedicating your life to it, and it spirited you away into fairylands where you were, and looked, frankly absurd.
Salman Rushdie
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We who have grown up on a diet of honour and shame can still grasp what must seem unthinkable to people living in the aftermath of the death of God and of tragedy: that men will sacrifice their dearest love on the implacable altars of their pride.
Salman Rushdie
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When thought becomes excessively painful, action is the finest remedy.
Salman Rushdie
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Perhaps because my relationship with my father went through such a long, bumpy time, it's been very important for me to work to try to keep lines of communication open between my sons and myself to try to avoid my father's mistakes. At least if you're making mistakes, make different mistakes.
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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If you're offended, it's your problem.
Salman Rushdie
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I do think that there is such a thing as human nature, and that the things that we have in common are perhaps greater than the things that divide us.
Salman Rushdie
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I do think of Bombay as my hometown. Those are the streets I walked when I was learning to walk. And it's the place that my imagination has returned to more than anywhere else.
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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Meaning is a shaky edifice we build out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old fillms, small victories, people hated, people loved perhaps it is because our sense of what is the case is constructed from such inadequate materials that we defend it so fiercely, even to death.
Salman Rushdie
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Make as much racket as you like people. Noise is life and an excess of noise is a sign that life is good. There will be time for us all to be quiet when we are safely dead.
Salman Rushdie
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Of course, there is nothing intrinsic linking any religion with any act of violence. The crusades don't prove that Christianity was violent. The Inquisition doesn't prove that Christianity tortures people. But that Christianity did torture people.
Salman Rushdie
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Fundamentalists of all faiths are the fundamental evil of our time.
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