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The history of a culture can be determined by its untranslatable words.

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
Untranslatable
Determined
Words
History
Culture

More quotes by Salman Rushdie

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Liberate yourself, because no one else is going to liberate you
Salman Rushdie
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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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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
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I didn't become a writer to write about me.
Salman Rushdie
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But love is what we want, not freedom. Who then is the unluckier man? The beloved, who is given his heart's desire and must for ever after fear its loss, or the free man, with his unlooked-for liberty, naked and alone between the captive armies of the earth?
Salman Rushdie
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From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable.
Salman Rushdie
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What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist. Without the freedom to challenge, even to satirize all orthodoxies, it ceases to exist. Language and the imagination cannot be imprisoned, or art will die, and with it, a little of what makes us human.
Salman Rushdie
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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.
Salman Rushdie
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I don't read my books, I write them. Once I've finished the many years it usually takes me to write them, I can't bear to read them, because I've spent too long with them already. I'm not advertising them very well, am I?
Salman Rushdie
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Religion, a mediaeval form of unreason, when combined with modern weaponry becomes a real threat to our freedoms. This religious totalitarianism has caused a deadly mutation in the heart of Islam and we see the tragic consequences in Paris today.
Salman Rushdie
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Sometimes I think that when people become famous, there's a public perception that they are not human beings any more. They don't have feelings they don't get hurt you can act and say as you like about them.
Salman Rushdie
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A man who catches History's eye is thereafter bound to a mistress from whom he will never escape.
Salman Rushdie
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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
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When you know what you're against you have taken the first step to discovering what you're for.
Salman Rushdie
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I don't think I've ever quite grown out of it, actually. There was a point where I could recite some of those Elvish verses - which I've mercifully forgotten. But I can still, if really pushed, recite the text of the inside of the ruling ring in the language of Mordor.
Salman Rushdie
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I have no problem with people's religious beliefs. I just don't happen to have any.
Salman Rushdie
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The First Amendment defends all forms of speech including hate speech, which is why groups like Ku Klux Klan are allowed to utter their poisonous remarks.
Salman Rushdie
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We must conclude that it is not only a particular political ideology that has failed, but the idea that men and women could ever define themselves in terms that exclude their spiritual needs.
Salman Rushdie
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Bin Laden was born filthy rich and died in a rich man's house, which he had painstakingly built to the highest specifications.
Salman Rushdie
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You can't judge an internal injury by the size of the hole.
Salman Rushdie