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One of the things I know from the study of history is that history surprises you. History is not written. It's not inevitable.The victory of evil is not certain.

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
Victory
Study
Written
Evil
History
Certain
Surprises
Things
Inevitable
Surprise

More quotes by Salman Rushdie

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Islam is unusual in that it's the only one of the great world religions which was born inside recorded history. That there's an enormous amount of factual historical record about the life of a prophet and about social conditions in Arabia at that time. So it's possible to look at the origin of Islam in a scholarly way.
Salman Rushdie
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This paranoid Islam, which blames outsider, 'infidels', for all the ills of Muslim societies, and whose proposed remedy is the closing of those societies to the rival project of modernity, is presently the fastest growing version of Islam in the world.
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 have to say that after some initial resistance, I'm now a complete 'Game of Thrones' addict.
Salman Rushdie
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War used to be something you could stand on the nearby hill and watch. Now we have total war everybody's in it. We have total economics as well. Everything affects everybody. The Malaysian currency shakes, and people around the world are seriously affected.
Salman Rushdie
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I don't like books that play to the gallery, but I've become more concerned with telling a story as clearly and engagingly as I can.
Salman Rushdie
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American literature has always been immigrant.
Salman Rushdie
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One of the characteristics of mudslinging is that mud sticks if it's thrown with enough force for long enough.
Salman Rushdie
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I grew up falling in love with kind of story, amazing, wonder tale of the East, which if you're a child growing up in India is all around you.And I think one of the gifts it gave me as a writer was this early knowledge that stories are not true.
Salman Rushdie
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The First Amendment defends all forms of speech including hate speech, which is why groups like Ku Klux Klan are allowed to utter their poisonous remarks.
Salman Rushdie
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You can adhere to your faith, but that faith needs to march in line with the rest of the world and needs to find a way of expressing itself in the modern world.
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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Human beings, you see, do absolutely two primary things. We see like and unlike. Like becomes, in literature, simile and metaphor. Unlike becomes uniqueness and difference, from which I believe, the novel is born.
Salman Rushdie
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I used to say, 'There is a God-shaped hole in me.' For a long time I stressed the absence, the hole. Now I find it is the shape which has become more important.
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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What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist. Without the freedom to challenge, even to satirize all orthodoxies, it ceases to exist. Language and the imagination cannot be imprisoned, or art will die, and with it, a little of what makes us human.
Salman Rushdie
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One of the strange things about violent and authoritarian regimes is they don't like the glare of negative publicity.
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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I'm definitely post-something.
Salman Rushdie
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Some people are paralyzed by the consciousness of death, other people live with it.... The fatwa certainly made me think about it a lot more than I ever had. I guess I know I'm going to die, but then, so are you.
Salman Rushdie