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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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Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination and of the heart.
Salman Rushdie
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The West should be tougher on Pakistan. It is trying to play both ends against the middle - to look like the friend of the revolutionaries on the one hand and a friend of the West in the fight against terrorism. It can't be both things.
Salman Rushdie
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Five mysteries hold the keys to the unseen: the act of love, and the birth of a baby, and the contemplation of great art, and being in the presence of death or disaster, and hearing the human voice lifted in song.
Salman Rushdie
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The west was involved in toppling the Mossadegh government. That ultimately led to the Iranian revolution.
Salman Rushdie
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I am gagged and imprisoned. I can't even speak. I want to kick a football in a park with my son. Ordinary, banal life: my impossible dream.
Salman Rushdie
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Now I know what a ghost is. Unfinished business, that's what.
Salman Rushdie
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One of the reasons my name is Rushdie is that my father was an admirer of Ibn Rush'd, the 12th century Arab philosopher known as Averroes in the West. In his time, he was making the non-literalist case for interpreting the Koran.
Salman Rushdie
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Nobody ever recognizes themselves unless they are not the character. There are many people who have claimed to be in my books, but unfortunately they were usually people that I didn't know.
Salman Rushdie
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A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it or offer your own version in return.
Salman Rushdie
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Is birth always a fall?
Salman Rushdie
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I have been a film buff all my life and believe that the finest cinema is fully the equal of the best novels.
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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As though she had entered a fable, as though she were no more than words crawling along a dry page, or as though she were becoming that page itself, that surface on which her story would be written and across which there blew a hot and merciless wind, turning her body to papyrus, her skin to parchment, her soul to paper.
Salman Rushdie
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One either loves, or waits for love, or banishes love for good. That is the full range of possible choices.
Salman Rushdie
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I stand with Charlie Hebdo, as we all must, to defend the art of satire, which has always been a force for liberty and against tyranny, dishonesty and stupidity.
Salman Rushdie
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It's always been colossally important to me that my books should be well received in India. It's where I come from.
Salman Rushdie
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Such is the miraculous nature of the future of exiles: what is first uttered in the impotence of an overheated apartment becomes the fate of nations.
Salman Rushdie
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I have to say that after some initial resistance, I'm now a complete 'Game of Thrones' addict.
Salman Rushdie
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Sometimes writing a novel is not unlike having a baby. You'd have to ask a female novelist to compare the pain.
Salman Rushdie
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I needed my stuff around me, and in that little cocoon I felt good, and I could work.
Salman Rushdie