Quote

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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Salman Rushdie
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: June 19
Actor
Essayist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Bombay
Rushdie
Joseph Anton
Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie
Even
Makes
Challenge
Art
Exist
Orthodoxies
Cannot
Expression
Satirize
Littles
Challenges
Imprisoned
Little
Imagination
Offend
Human
Dies
Orthodoxy
Humans
Freedom
Ceases
Without
Language
Cease

More quotes by Salman Rushdie

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A man who invents himself needs someone to believe in him... Not only the need to be believed in, but the need to believe in another. You've got it: Love.
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The history of life was not the bumbling progress - the very English, middle-class progress - Victorian thought had wanted it to be, but violent, a thing of dramatic, cumulative transformations: in the old formulation, more revolution than evolution.
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Religion is responsible for a lot of the problems in the history of the world and it's not something that I practice or recommend, but to each his own.
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You don't fight radical conservatism with not-quite-so radical conservatism.
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Wherever goodness lay, it did not lie in ritual, unthinking obeisance before a deity but rather, perhaps, in the slow clumsy, error-strewn working out of an individual or collective path.
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Bin Laden was born filthy rich and died in a rich man's house, which he had painstakingly built to the highest specifications.
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Rock n' roll was a kid when I was a kid.
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Everything has shape, if you look for it. There is no escape from form.
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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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I want to write novels. I want to write stories. I want to do the stuff that I became a writer to do.
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For every snake, there is a ladder for every ladder,a snake
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Before I came to England, my favorite authors were P. G. Wodehouse and Agatha Christie. I used to devour both.
Salman Rushdie
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Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination and of the heart.
Salman Rushdie
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Children like being a little scared, but they don't want to be disturbed.
Salman Rushdie
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Nobody ever recognizes themselves unless they are not the character. There are many people who have claimed to be in my books, but unfortunately they were usually people that I didn't know.
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To understand just one life you have to swallow the world ... do you wonder, then, that I was a heavy child?
Salman Rushdie
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Sometimes when you finish a book, you don't know quite what you've got.
Salman Rushdie
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Life is elsewhere. Cross frontiers. Fly away.
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I hate admitting that my enemies have a point.
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