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For many people, I've ceased to be a human being. I've become an issue, a bother, an affair.... And has it really been so long since religions persecuted people, burning them as heretics, drowning them as witches, that you can't recognize religious persecution when you see it?

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
Become
Bother
Witches
Human
Affair
Heretic
Humans
Burning
Persecuted
Many
Issue
Ceased
Long
Recognize
Drowning
Really
Issues
Persecution
People
Since
Witch
Religious
Religions
Heretics

More quotes by Salman Rushdie

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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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When you write you in a way write out of what you think of as your best self, the part of you that is lacking in foibles and weaknesses and egotism and vanities and so on. You're just trying to really say something as truthful as you can out of the best that you have in you.
Salman Rushdie
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One minute you've got a lucky star watching over you and the next instant it's done a bunk.
Salman Rushdie
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We are the storytelling animal.
Salman Rushdie
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I've never had very high regard for therapists. I owe my health, my mental survival, to my friends and loved ones.
Salman Rushdie
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The West should be tougher on Pakistan. It is trying to play both ends against the middle - to look like the friend of the revolutionaries on the one hand and a friend of the West in the fight against terrorism. It can't be both things.
Salman Rushdie
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War used to be something you could stand on the nearby hill and watch. Now we have total war everybody's in it. We have total economics as well. Everything affects everybody. The Malaysian currency shakes, and people around the world are seriously affected.
Salman Rushdie
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When thought becomes excessively painful, action is the finest remedy.
Salman Rushdie
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Free societies...are societies in motion, and with motion comes tension, dissent, friction. Free people strike sparks, and those sparks are the best evidence of freedom's existence.
Salman Rushdie
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The First Amendment defends all forms of speech including hate speech, which is why groups like Ku Klux Klan are allowed to utter their poisonous remarks.
Salman Rushdie
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How do you defeat terrorism? Don’t be terrorized.
Salman Rushdie
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Nobody wants to read a 600 page book in which the author is fabulous throughout.
Salman Rushdie
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Certainly, poverty and economic decline have a lot to do with the so-called rage of Islam. You've got all these young men in countries which are economically in bad shape. The idea that they might be able to make a good living and get married and have a family, a decent life, seems very remote to a lot of people in a lot of the world.
Salman Rushdie
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The sixty-minute drama form has become very rich.
Salman Rushdie
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The rate of change is global now. I think there's a kind of mind that is so ill at ease with that transformation that it reaches out for something permanent. And religious faith offers that, from simplicities, which you are told are eternal and unchanging, and you can hold on to those like a life raft in a metamorphosing world.
Salman Rushdie
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Because I've always felt, whether the fatwa or whatever, the writer's great weapon is the truth and integrity of his voice. And as long as what you're saying is what you truly, honestly believe to be the case, then whatever the consequences, that's fine. That's an honorable position.
Salman Rushdie
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Perhaps because my relationship with my father went through such a long, bumpy time, it's been very important for me to work to try to keep lines of communication open between my sons and myself to try to avoid my father's mistakes. At least if you're making mistakes, make different mistakes.
Salman Rushdie
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The west was involved in toppling the Mossadegh government. That ultimately led to the Iranian revolution.
Salman Rushdie
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If Woody Allen were a Muslim, he'd be dead by now.
Salman Rushdie
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Peace, perfect peace, in this dark world of sin? The Blood of Jesus whispers peace within.
Salman Rushdie