Quote

When you write you in a way write out of what you think of as your best self, the part of you that is lacking in foibles and weaknesses and egotism and vanities and so on. You're just trying to really say something as truthful as you can out of the best that you have in you.

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
Think
Part
Foibles
Thinking
Best
Egotism
Self
Weaknesses
Writing
Truthful
Trying
Lacking
Something
Vanity
Really
Weakness
Way
Write
Vanities

More quotes by Salman Rushdie

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The liveliness of literature lies in its exceptionality, in being the individual, idiosyncratic vision of one human being, in which, to our delight and great surprise, we may find our own vision reflected.
Salman Rushdie
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There is a widespread difficulty in the Muslim world, which has to do with how the people are taught about examining their own history. A whole range of stuff has been placed off limits.
Salman Rushdie
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Very often, people who actually pick up a book of mine for the first time are kind of surprised. And I get these letters saying, well, who knew that you were good, you know?
Salman Rushdie
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What had been (at the beginning) no bigger than a full stop had expanded into a comma, a word, a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter now it was bursting into more complex developments, becoming, one might say, a book - perhaps an encylopaedia - even a whole language.
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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The time-honored role of the artist [is] to speak truth to power.
Salman Rushdie
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If you take a look at history, you will find that the understanding of what is good and evil has always existed before the individual religions. The religions were only invented by people afterwards, in order to express this idea.
Salman Rushdie
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I believe in the art of literature, I believe in freedom of the imagination, I believe in the kind of liberties that we enjoy in these lucky countries of the world.
Salman Rushdie
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The response of anybody interested in liberty is that we all have a say and the ability to have an argument is exactly what liberty is, even though it may never be resolved. In any authoritarian society the possessor of power dictates, and if you try and step outside he will come after you.
Salman Rushdie
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I want to write novels. I want to write stories. I want to do the stuff that I became a writer to do.
Salman Rushdie
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Hyperrealism can create an atmosphere of surrealism because nobody sees the world in such detail.
Salman Rushdie
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Life is elsewhere. Cross frontiers. Fly away.
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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We are the only animals that tell stories to understand the world we live in.
Salman Rushdie
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Certainly, poverty and economic decline have a lot to do with the so-called rage of Islam. You've got all these young men in countries which are economically in bad shape. The idea that they might be able to make a good living and get married and have a family, a decent life, seems very remote to a lot of people in a lot of the world.
Salman Rushdie
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I will come back to India - so deal with it.
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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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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Wherever goodness lay, it did not lie in ritual, unthinking obeisance before a deity but rather, perhaps, in the slow clumsy, error-strewn working out of an individual or collective path.
Salman Rushdie
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I think it's a very important function of art to challenge accepted reality, especially when that reality is created by powerful interest groups.
Salman Rushdie