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Unfortunately, the problem of the free speech argument is that you have to defend people you can't stand.

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
People
Unfortunately
Defend
Argument
Speech
Stand
Free
Problem

More quotes by Salman Rushdie

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Once you put a thought into the world, it can be disagreed with, but it can't be unthought.
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I'm no friend of Tony Blair's and I consider the Middle East policies of the United States and the UK fatal.
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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.
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I have never really thought of myself as a writer about religion. And I think one of the things that happened to me as a result of all that is that I think it did for some people, many people, obscure the kind of writer that I actually am.
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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.
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Bin Laden was born filthy rich and died in a rich man's house, which he had painstakingly built to the highest specifications.
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The only way of living in a free society is to feel that you have the right to say and do stuff.
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We all owe death a life.
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If there is a choice between absolute safety and freedom, then freedom must always prevail.
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Human beings, you see, do absolutely two primary things. We see like and unlike. Like becomes, in literature, simile and metaphor. Unlike becomes uniqueness and difference, from which I believe, the novel is born.
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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.
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When I was writing The Satanic Verses, if you had asked me about the phenomenon that we all now know as radical Islam, I wouldn't have had much to say. As recently as the mid-1980s, it didn't seem to be a big deal.
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Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images they fight for the same territory.
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Have you noticed the physical resemblance between Imran Khan and Gaddafi? If you were making a movie of the life of Gaddafi and you wanted a slightly better-looking version of Gaddafi, you might cast Imran Khan.
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You want all your books to stick around after you've gone.
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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.
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It may be that the books that were best liked in your lifetime are not the ones that are best liked 100 years later.
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thought I was doing two things. One is inquiring into the phenomenon of revelation, if you are not a religious person. But, clearly, it's a sincere phenomenon.
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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.
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I discovered that if you find the language to talk to younger readers, children can accept anything.
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