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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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Friendships are the family we make - not the one we inherit. I've always been someone to whom friendship, elective affinities, is as important as family.
Salman Rushdie
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It is very, very easy not to be offended by a book. You just have to shut it.
Salman Rushdie
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People are always telling me that they've seen people reading my books on the subway, or the beach, or whenever.
Salman Rushdie
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Free-form games in which the player can make choices about what the game is going to be, become a kind of gaming equivalent of the narrative possibility.
Salman Rushdie
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People would come and threaten them. And they would respond by putting the book in the window. Behind that, the publishers, many of whom were menaced and receiving anonymous phone calls of the very menacing kind and so, almost everybody - not everybody, but almost everybody held the line.
Salman Rushdie
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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
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There's going to be no more compromise on issues where there should not be compromise. Enough with appeasement or apology and mollifying, all that. To hell with all that. I'm just going to fight my corner.
Salman Rushdie
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If by some bizarre chance there turns out to be a god [...], I'm willing to bet he's an atheist too.
Salman Rushdie
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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.
Salman Rushdie
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I was 21 in 1968, so I'm as much a child of the '60s as is possible to be. In those years the subject of religion had really almost disappeared the idea that religion was going to be a major force in the life of our societies, in the West anyway, would have seemed absurd in 1968.
Salman Rushdie
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I don't think people cry reading 'Midnight's Children,' but a lot of people seem to cry watching the movie.
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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Throughout human history, the apostles of purity, those who have claimed to possess a total explanation, have wrought havoc among mere mixed-up human beings.
Salman Rushdie
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All names mean something.
Salman Rushdie
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Pakistan is alarmed by the rising Indian influence in Afghanistan, and fears that an Afghanistan cleansed of the Taliban would be an Indian client state, thus sandwiching Pakistan between two hostile countries. The paranoia of Pakistan about India's supposed dark machinations should never be underestimated.
Salman Rushdie
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Be sure that you go to the author to get at his meaning, not to find yours.
Salman Rushdie
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Realism can break a writer's heart.
Salman Rushdie
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That's the trouble with you sad-city types: a place has to be miserable and dull as ditchwater before you believe it's real.
Salman Rushdie
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Hell is other people's fantasies.
Salman Rushdie
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We are described into corners, and then we must describe ourselves out of corners.
Salman Rushdie