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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
Thousands
Sacred
Started
Literature
Interesting
Place
Subtly
Ideas
Embodied
Years
Religions

More quotes by Salman Rushdie

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Throughout human history, the apostles of purity, those who have claimed to possess a total explanation, have wrought havoc among mere mixed-up human beings.
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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Certainly, the Hollywood cinema, there's almost nothing of interest coming out of there.
Salman Rushdie
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We live in an age where the rate of change has been colossal. Colossal. Almost every week there's some transformation of some kind, whether technological or political or scientific, whatever. And I think it's bewildering to human beings to live in a time when they can't take anything as fixed - when everything is shifting and changing all the time.
Salman Rushdie
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Of course, there is nothing intrinsic linking any religion with any act of violence. The crusades don't prove that Christianity was violent. The Inquisition doesn't prove that Christianity tortures people. But that Christianity did torture people.
Salman Rushdie
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You never know the answers to the questions of life until you are asked.
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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You can't assume if you do something contentious that people will be on your side. The moment violence enters the story, the story changes. Then the question is, How do you face up to violence? And then you have to have a no-compromise position. And this is quite simply a lesson we learn in the school playground.
Salman Rushdie
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How to forgive the world for its beauty, which merely disguises its ugliness for its gentleness, which merely cloaks its cruelty for its illusion of continuity, seamlessly, as the night follows the day, so to speak- whereas in reality life is a series of brutal raptures, falling upon your defenseless hands, like the blows of a woodman's axe?
Salman Rushdie
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I have been a film buff all my life and believe that the finest cinema is fully the equal of the best novels.
Salman Rushdie
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Broad-mindedness is related to tolerance open-mindedness is the sibling of peace.
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 characteristics of mudslinging is that mud sticks if it's thrown with enough force for long enough.
Salman Rushdie
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The writers of the French enlightenment had deliberately used blasphemy as a weapon, refusing to accept the power of the Church to set limiting points on thought.
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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There needs to be a thorough examination, by Muslims everywhere, of why it is that the faith they love breeds so many violent mutant strains.
Salman Rushdie
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A sigh isn't just a sigh. We inhale the world and breathe out meaning. While we can. While we can.
Salman Rushdie
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I am certainly not a good Muslim. But I am able now to say that I am Muslim in fact it is a source of happiness to say that I am now inside, and a part of the community whose values have always been closest to my heart.
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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Something was badly amiss with the spiritual life of the planet...Too many demons inside people claiming to believe in God.
Salman Rushdie