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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

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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
Thinking
Groups
Challenges
Powerful
Interest
Accepted
Art
Challenge
Reality
Function
Important
Created
Think
Especially

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What can't be cured must be endured.
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The only way of living in a free society is to feel that you have the right to say and do stuff.
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Sometimes great, banned works defy the censor's description and impose themselves on the world - 'Ulysses,' 'Lolita,' the 'Arabian Nights.'
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All names mean something.
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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.
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One minute you've got a lucky star watching over you and the next instant it's done a bunk.
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He had picked up languages the way most sailors pick up diseases languages were his gonorrhoea, his syphilis, his scurvy, his ague, his plague.
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Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts.
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Don't you know girls have to fool people every day of their lives if they want to get anywhere?
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Peace, perfect peace, in this dark world of sin? The Blood of Jesus whispers peace within.
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There needs to be a thorough examination, by Muslims everywhere, of why it is that the faith they love breeds so many violent mutant strains.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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It seems that the right of freedom of speech that was enshrined in numerous constitutions is now under attack by religious institutions.
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Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can't forgive.
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The PEN/Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to Write Award is a way of spotlighting individual cases. If you look at the history of the award, the freedom rate is very high: a very high percentage of people who receive those awards are freed in the next six months to a year. The only weapon there is attention, but interestingly it works.
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The novel does not seek to establish a privileged language but it insists upon the freedom to portray and analyze the struggle between the different contestants for such privileges.
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The question I'm always asking myself is: are we masters or victims? Do we make history, or does history make us? Do we shape the world, or are we just shaped by it? The question of do we have agency in our lives or whether we are just passive victims of events is, I think, a great question, and one that I have always tried to ask.
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When I'm writing a book, sentence by sentence, I'm not thinking theoretically. I'm just trying to work out the story from inside the characters I've got.
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