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A man is sane only to the extent that he subscribes to a previously-agreed construction of reality.

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
Previously
Agreed
Construction
Sane
Extent
Reality
Men
Subscribes

More quotes by Salman Rushdie

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I've never rejected the world I came from. To be rejected by it is horrible.
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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The interesting thing about history sometimes. is that you know these people existed, and you knew what jobs they did, but you don't know much about them as people, so you actually have to make them up.
Salman Rushdie
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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.
Salman Rushdie
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Five mysteries hold the keys to the unseen: the act of love, and the birth of a baby, and the contemplation of great art, and being in the presence of death or disaster, and hearing the human voice lifted in song.
Salman Rushdie
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There are two things in Indian history - one is the incredible optimism and potential of the place, and the other is the betrayal of that potential - for example, corruption. Those two strands intertwine through the whole of Indian history, and maybe not just Indian history.
Salman Rushdie
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Airport security exists to guard us against terrorist attacks.
Salman Rushdie
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My children are English, and both of their mothers were English.
Salman Rushdie
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I remember when I was young, many cities in the Muslim world were cosmopolitan cities with a lot of culture.
Salman Rushdie
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Even the Islam stuff I thought was pretty respectful about Islam in a funny way. I mean, yes, from a secular point of view, but it talks about the birth of this religion, and I thought it was pretty admiring of the person at the center of it, the prophet of Islam.
Salman Rushdie
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You start at the stupid end of the book, and if you're lucky you finish at the smart end.
Salman Rushdie
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There's a lot of conflict and darkness inside everybody's family. We all pretend to outsiders that it's not so but behind locked doors there are usually high emotions running.
Salman Rushdie
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I always thought the front line was the bookstores. And bookstores around America, around the world did astonishingly well. They held the line. They didn't chicken out. You know, they defended the book. They kept it in the front of the store.
Salman Rushdie
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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.
Salman Rushdie
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Friendships are the family we make - not the one we inherit. I've always been someone to whom friendship, elective affinities, is as important as family.
Salman Rushdie
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There's going to be no more compromise on issues where there should not be compromise. Enough with appeasement or apology and mollifying, all that. To hell with all that. I'm just going to fight my corner.
Salman Rushdie
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YouTube is full of pieces of trash. If you want to look on YouTube and find something that insults you, you can probably find it.
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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I determined to make my peace with Islam, even at the cost of my pride. Those who were surprised and displeased by what I did perhaps failed to see that ... I wanted to make peace between the warring halves of the world, which were also the warring halves of my soul.
Salman Rushdie
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Very often in free speech cases you find yourself defending material that you personally detest, because of course it's no trick to defend the free speech of people you either agree with or who don't particularly upset you. It's when people really upset you that you discover if you believe in free speech or not.
Salman Rushdie