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I have no problem with people's religious beliefs. I just don't happen to have any.

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
Problem
People
Beliefs
Happen
Belief
Religious
Happens

More quotes by Salman Rushdie

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optimism is a disease
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Bread and books: food for the body and food for the soul - what could be more worthy of our respect, and even love?
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If you have children you worry about the world you're leaving them.
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One of the things I've thought about 'Midnight's Children' is that it is a novel which puts a Muslim family at the centre of the Indian experience.
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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?
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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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At the height of the British Empire very few English novels were written that dealt with British power. It's extraordinary that at the moment in which England was the global superpower the subject of British power appeared not to interest most writers.
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My grandmother was very fierce and gruff. She was quite small, but she was very wide.
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I am certainly not a good Muslim. But I am able now to say that I am Muslim in fact it is a source of happiness to say that I am now inside, and a part of the community whose values have always been closest to my heart.
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So India’s problem turns out to be the world’s problem. What happened in India has happened in God’s name. The problem’s name is God.
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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.
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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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Certainly, the Hollywood cinema, there's almost nothing of interest coming out of there.
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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And using that - the birth of a religion, it suggests that you have got two tests. You have the test of weakness. When you're weak, do you compromise, do you bend, do you give in, do you accommodate? And then the test of strength. When you're strong, are you merciful, are you generous, or are you cruel?
Salman Rushdie
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The real risks for any artist are taken in pushing the work to the limits of what is possible, in the attempt to increase the sum of what it is possible to think. Books become good when they go to this edge and risk falling over it -when they endanger the artist by reason of what he has, or has not, artistically dared.
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Not even the visionary or mystical experience ever lasts very long. It is for art to capture that experience, to offer it to, in the case of literature, its readers to be, for a secular, materialist culture, some sort of replacement for what the love of god offers in the world of faith.
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Before I came to England, my favorite authors were P. G. Wodehouse and Agatha Christie. I used to devour both.
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It just requires so much of you, and most of the time you feel dumb.
Salman Rushdie
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If you're offended, it's your problem.
Salman Rushdie