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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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Salman Rushdie
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: June 19
Actor
Essayist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Bombay
Rushdie
Joseph Anton
Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie
Finish
Smart
Lucky
Stupid
Start
Ends
Book

More quotes by Salman Rushdie

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I'm not a prophet, but I always thought it was natural for dictatorships to fall. I remember in 1989, two months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, had you said it was going to happen no one would have believed you. The system seemed powerful and unbreakable. Suddenly overnight it blew away like dust.
Salman Rushdie
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I think people direct good films when they feel personal to them, not because it's a famous book or something. It has to something move over that and somehow become personal to the director.
Salman Rushdie
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Anyone who has had the experience of going through American security checks knows the purpose of these checks is not to make you safer it's just to annoy you.
Salman Rushdie
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A mature society understands that at the heart of democracy is argument.
Salman Rushdie
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A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it or offer your own version in return.
Salman Rushdie
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When thought becomes excessively painful, action is the finest remedy.
Salman Rushdie
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Meaning is a shaky edifice we build out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old fillms, small victories, people hated, people loved perhaps it is because our sense of what is the case is constructed from such inadequate materials that we defend it so fiercely, even to death.
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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Can one drown in one's element... If fish can drown in water, can human beings suffocate in air?
Salman Rushdie
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A man who catches History's eye is thereafter bound to a mistress from whom he will never escape.
Salman Rushdie
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The PEN/Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to Write Award is a way of spotlighting individual cases. If you look at the history of the award, the freedom rate is very high: a very high percentage of people who receive those awards are freed in the next six months to a year. The only weapon there is attention, but interestingly it works.
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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Only the foolish, blinded by language's conventions, think of fire as red or gold. Fire is blue at it's melancholy rim, green in it's envious heart. It may burn white, or even, in it's greatest rages, black.
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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So India’s problem turns out to be the world’s problem. What happened in India has happened in God’s name. The problem’s name is God.
Salman Rushdie
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It is commonly and, I believe, accurately said of Pakistan that her women are much more impressive than her men.
Salman Rushdie
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American literature has always been immigrant.
Salman Rushdie
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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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I don't think there is a need for an entity like God in my life.
Salman Rushdie
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Make as much racket as you like people. Noise is life and an excess of noise is a sign that life is good. There will be time for us all to be quiet when we are safely dead.
Salman Rushdie