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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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My parents gave me the gift of irreligion, of growing up without bothering to ask people what gods they held dear, assuming that in fact, like my parents, they weren't interested in gods, and that this uninterest was 'normal.' You may argue that the gift was a poisoned chalice, but even if so, that's a cup from which I'd happily drink again.
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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Sometimes great, banned works defy the censor's description and impose themselves on the world - 'Ulysses,' 'Lolita,' the 'Arabian Nights.'
Salman Rushdie
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I did a lot of student acting when I was young.
Salman Rushdie
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To understand just one life you have to swallow the world ... do you wonder, then, that I was a heavy child?
Salman Rushdie
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What's the use of stories that aren't even true?
Salman Rushdie
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The only privilege literature deserves - and this privilege it requires in order to exist - is the privilege of being in the arena of discourse, the place where the struggle of our languages can be acted out.
Salman Rushdie
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I do not need the idea of God to explain the world I live in.
Salman Rushdie
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Human beings understand themselves and shape their futures by arguing and challenging and questioning and saying the un-sayable, not by bowing the knee whether to gods or to men.
Salman Rushdie
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A people that has remained convinced of its greatness and invulnerability, that has chosen to believe such a myth in the face of all the evidence, is a people in the grip of a kind of sleep, or madness.
Salman Rushdie
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If you actually want to change your world, there is a better way of doing it than blowing yourself up.
Salman Rushdie
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The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas - uncertainty, progress, change - into crimes.
Salman Rushdie
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I do have a lot of time for people in my life, and friendship is a very important subject for me. I think I'm unusual among the writers I know in that respect.
Salman Rushdie
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What you were is forever who you are.
Salman Rushdie
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I didn't become a writer to write about me.
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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We live in an age where the rate of change has been colossal. Colossal. Almost every week there's some transformation of some kind, whether technological or political or scientific, whatever. And I think it's bewildering to human beings to live in a time when they can't take anything as fixed - when everything is shifting and changing all the time.
Salman Rushdie
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Our lives are not what we deserve they are, let us agree, in many ways deficient.
Salman Rushdie
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For every snake, there is a ladder for every ladder,a snake
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