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I don't dictate to anyone what to believe and what not to. And I don't want that to be dictated to me either.

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
Either
Anyone
Believe
Dictated
Dictate

More quotes by 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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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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Too many people had spent too long demonizing or totemizing me to listen seriously to what I had to say.
Salman Rushdie
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I'm not a big fan of there being voiceovers in movies. I really prefer it when the film tells it story.
Salman Rushdie
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The worst, most insidious effect of censorship is that, in the end, it can deaden the imagination of the people. Where there is no debate, it is hard to go on remembering, every day, that there is a suppressed side to every argument.
Salman Rushdie
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Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.
Salman Rushdie
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I'm not a prophet, but I always thought it was natural for dictatorships to fall. I remember in 1989, two months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, had you said it was going to happen no one would have believed you. The system seemed powerful and unbreakable. Suddenly overnight it blew away like dust.
Salman Rushdie
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All my adult life, if I didn't have several hours a day to sit in a room by myself, I would get antsy and irritable.
Salman Rushdie
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The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas - uncertainty, progress, change - into crimes.
Salman Rushdie
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We must agree on what matters: kissing in public places, bacon sandwiches, disagreement, cutting-edge fashion, literature, generosity, water, a more equitable distribution of the world's resources, movies, music, freedom of thought, beauty, love.
Salman Rushdie
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When you write, you write out of your best self. Everything else drops away.
Salman Rushdie
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Don't you know girls have to fool people every day of their lives if they want to get anywhere?
Salman Rushdie
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I am clearly vulnerable to these more passionate and volatile unstable relationships. I am trying to not be so vulnerable.
Salman Rushdie
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I think if we wish to live in any kind of a moral universe, we must hold the perpetrators of violence responsible for the violence they perpetrate. It's very simple. The criminal is responsible for the crime.
Salman Rushdie
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The thing that I think was very brave of my younger self was that he decided he would be an idiot. Just persevere. That feels brave to me: deciding that I'm going to damn well be this person that I've set my heart on being.
Salman Rushdie
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I get a lot of letters - a lot of letters saying, who knew that you were funny?
Salman Rushdie
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We have come to think of taking offence as a fundamental right. We value very little more highly than our rage, which gives us, in our opinion, the moral high ground. From there we can shoot down at our enemies and inflict heavy fatalities.
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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The suicide bomber's imagination leads him to believe in a brilliant act of heroism, when in fact he is simply blowing himself up pointlessly and taking other people's lives.
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