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What I've always seen in writers and artists is the courage it takes to make an original work of art. I think the real risks in literature are linguistic and intellectual, and I hope we can highlight those, as well as political courage.

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
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Art
Intellectual
Highlight
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Political
Courage
Linguistic
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Risk
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Always
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Writers

More quotes by 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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People must be protected from prejudice against their person. But people cannot be protected from prejudice against their ideas - because otherwise we're all done.
Salman Rushdie
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Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can't forgive.
Salman Rushdie
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I for one don't need a supreme sacred arbiter in order to be a moral being.
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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I grew up in a family in which there was very little religion. My father wasn't religious at all. But he was really interested in the subject of, you know, the birth and growth of Islam. And he basically transmitted that interest to me.
Salman Rushdie
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This strange business of what it is to be a writer is this increasingly insane world in which we live, in which surrealism, it seems, is the new realism.
Salman Rushdie
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Can one drown in one's element... If fish can drown in water, can human beings suffocate in air?
Salman Rushdie
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The mistake of the West was to put the Sauds on the throne of Saudi Arabia and give them control of the world's oil fortune, which they then used to propagate Wahhabi Islam.
Salman Rushdie
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How to forgive the world for its beauty, which merely disguises its ugliness for its gentleness, which merely cloaks its cruelty for its illusion of continuity, seamlessly, as the night follows the day, so to speak- whereas in reality life is a series of brutal raptures, falling upon your defenseless hands, like the blows of a woodman's axe?
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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Airport security exists to guard us against terrorist attacks.
Salman Rushdie
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The history of a culture can be determined by its untranslatable words.
Salman Rushdie
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Hell is other people's fantasies.
Salman Rushdie
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You can't have modern states based on ideas which have been out of date for a thousand years.
Salman Rushdie
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Everybody loves 'The Wire,' and I think it's okay, but in the end it's just a police series.
Salman Rushdie
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Things, even people have a way of leaking into each other like flavours when you cook.
Salman Rushdie
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Dissensions between Muslim nations run at least as deep, if not deeper, than those nations' resentment of the West.
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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To understand just one life you have to swallow the world ... do you wonder, then, that I was a heavy child?
Salman Rushdie