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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
Evil
History
Certain
Surprises
Things
Inevitable
Surprise
Victory
Study
Written

More quotes by Salman Rushdie

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My parents gave me the gift of irreligion, of growing up without bothering to ask people what gods they held dear, assuming that in fact, like my parents, they weren't interested in gods, and that this uninterest was 'normal.' You may argue that the gift was a poisoned chalice, but even if so, that's a cup from which I'd happily drink again.
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Realism can break a writer's heart.
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It is often said by religious people that without its framework, there is no sense of right or wrong. My view is that religion comes after ethics.
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I discovered that if you find the language to talk to younger readers, children can accept anything.
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Sometimes when you finish a book, you don't know quite what you've got.
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‘Respect for religion’ has become a code phrase meaning ‘fear of religion.’ Religions, like all other ideas, deserve criticism, satire, and, yes, our fearless disrespect.
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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.
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When you write, you write out of your best self. Everything else drops away.
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I seem to have fallen for women with missing parents. Goodness knows what it signifies.
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India, the new myth--a collective fiction in which anything was possible, a fable rivalled only by the two other mighty fantasies: money and God.
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What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.
Salman Rushdie
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I'll tell you what divorce hasn't taught me. It didn't teach me not to get married again.
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Between shame and shamelessness lies the axis upon which we turn meteorological conditions at both these poles are of the most extreme, ferocious type. Shamelessness, shame: the roots of violence.
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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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If I were asked for a one-sentence sound bite on religion, I would say I was against it.
Salman Rushdie
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Travel was pointless. It removed you from the place in which you had a meaning, and to which you gave meaning in return by dedicating your life to it, and it spirited you away into fairylands where you were, and looked, frankly absurd.
Salman Rushdie
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Madame Bovary and a flying carpet, they are both untrue in the same way. Somebody made them up.
Salman Rushdie
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I had a very difficult relationship with my father, which ended up okay, but there were many difficult years.
Salman Rushdie
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We must conclude that it is not only a particular political ideology that has failed, but the idea that men and women could ever define themselves in terms that exclude their spiritual needs.
Salman Rushdie
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To be born again,' sang Gibreal Farishta tumbling from the heaveans, 'first you have to die. Ho ji! Ho ji! To land upon the bosomy earth, first one needs to fly Tat-taa! Takatun! How to ever smile again, if first you won't cry? How to win the darling's love mister, without a sigh?
Salman Rushdie