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Ideas are interesting to me, and religions are a place where ideas have been very subtly embodied for thousands of years. All literature started as sacred literature.

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
Interesting
Place
Subtly
Ideas
Embodied
Years
Religions
Thousands
Sacred
Started
Literature

More quotes by Salman Rushdie

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And so it is they who, between them, give me all the reasons for believing in none.
Salman Rushdie
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People would come and threaten them. And they would respond by putting the book in the window. Behind that, the publishers, many of whom were menaced and receiving anonymous phone calls of the very menacing kind and so, almost everybody - not everybody, but almost everybody held the line.
Salman Rushdie
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I don't read my books, I write them. Once I've finished the many years it usually takes me to write them, I can't bear to read them, because I've spent too long with them already. I'm not advertising them very well, am I?
Salman Rushdie
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The history of a culture can be determined by its untranslatable words.
Salman Rushdie
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How do you defeat terrorism? Don’t be terrorized.
Salman Rushdie
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Speaking as somebody with three sisters and a very largely female Muslim family, there is not a single woman I know in my family or in their friends who would have accepted the wearing of a veil.
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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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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The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas - uncertainty, progress, change - into crimes.
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.
Salman Rushdie
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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.
Salman Rushdie
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She saw him fracture into rainbow colors through the prism of her love.
Salman Rushdie
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The question I'm always asking myself is: are we masters or victims? Do we make history, or does history make us? Do we shape the world, or are we just shaped by it? The question of do we have agency in our lives or whether we are just passive victims of events is, I think, a great question, and one that I have always tried to ask.
Salman Rushdie
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This strange business of what it is to be a writer is this increasingly insane world in which we live, in which surrealism, it seems, is the new realism.
Salman Rushdie
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Ignorantly is how we all fall in love for it is a kind of fall. Closing our eyes, we leap from that cliff in hope of a soft landing. Nor is it always soft but still, without that leap nobody comes to life.
Salman Rushdie
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Rock n' roll was a kid when I was a kid.
Salman Rushdie
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One of the things I've thought about 'Midnight's Children' is that it is a novel which puts a Muslim family at the centre of the Indian experience.
Salman Rushdie
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In the cookie of life, friends are the chocolate chips.
Salman Rushdie
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I'm a reader of Chinese literature, I like their films, but also: I've had great difficulty getting my work published in China very little of it has been published there. The first two attempts to have all of my work published, for instance, were refused without any reason ever being given.
Salman Rushdie
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There is nothing like a War for the reinvention of lives.
Salman Rushdie