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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
Things
Inevitable
Surprise
Victory
Study
Written
Evil
History
Certain
Surprises

More quotes by Salman Rushdie

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I'm a novelist. Fortunately I don't have to rule the world.
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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.
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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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We are the storytelling animal.
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I want to write novels. I want to write stories. I want to do the stuff that I became a writer to do.
Salman Rushdie
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The response of anybody interested in liberty is that we all have a say and the ability to have an argument is exactly what liberty is, even though it may never be resolved. In any authoritarian society the possessor of power dictates, and if you try and step outside he will come after you.
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One of the things I've learnt is not to depend on there being a woman in your life to make it work. I love my work, I love my children, I've got wonderful friends, you know, I have a nice life.
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When you're writing for the screen you're really thinking all the time of what you have to do to make sure that they have the information that they need, that the emotional thread is not snapped, that the story moves at the right speed, to keep the audience hopefully sitting on the edge of their seats or else weeping or laughing.
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Children like being a little scared, but they don't want to be disturbed.
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What's real and what's true aren't necessarily the same.
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If you take a look at history, you will find that the understanding of what is good and evil has always existed before the individual religions. The religions were only invented by people afterwards, in order to express this idea.
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Speaking as somebody with three sisters and a very largely female Muslim family, there is not a single woman I know in my family or in their friends who would have accepted the wearing of a veil.
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The sixty-minute drama form has become very rich.
Salman Rushdie
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Now I know what a ghost is. Unfinished business, that's what.
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But I - and I just think it's very - one of the problems of defending the extraordinary principle of freedom of speech is that you have to defend freedom of speech for people like that too.
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Pakistan is alarmed by the rising Indian influence in Afghanistan, and fears that an Afghanistan cleansed of the Taliban would be an Indian client state, thus sandwiching Pakistan between two hostile countries. The paranoia of Pakistan about India's supposed dark machinations should never be underestimated.
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.
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Life is elsewhere. Cross frontiers. Fly away.
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Peace, perfect peace, in this dark world of sin? The Blood of Jesus whispers peace within.
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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.
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