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Very often in free speech cases you find yourself defending material that you personally detest, because of course it's no trick to defend the free speech of people you either agree with or who don't particularly upset you. It's when people really upset you that you discover if you believe in free speech or not.

Salman Rushdie

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Salman Rushdie
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: June 19
Actor
Essayist
Novelist
Screenwriter
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Bombay
Rushdie
Joseph Anton
Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie
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More quotes by Salman Rushdie

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The time-honored role of the artist [is] to speak truth to power.
Salman Rushdie
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I don't think people cry reading 'Midnight's Children,' but a lot of people seem to cry watching the movie.
Salman Rushdie
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Most of what matters in your life takes place in your absence.
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I used to say, 'There is a God-shaped hole in me.' For a long time I stressed the absence, the hole. Now I find it is the shape which has become more important.
Salman Rushdie
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When I'm writing a book, sentence by sentence, I'm not thinking theoretically. I'm just trying to work out the story from inside the characters I've got.
Salman Rushdie
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Not all possibilities are open to us. The world is finite our hopes spill over its rim.
Salman Rushdie
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I think it's a very important function of art to challenge accepted reality, especially when that reality is created by powerful interest groups.
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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The interesting thing about history sometimes. is that you know these people existed, and you knew what jobs they did, but you don't know much about them as people, so you actually have to make them up.
Salman Rushdie
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Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination and of the heart.
Salman Rushdie
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You can adhere to your faith, but that faith needs to march in line with the rest of the world and needs to find a way of expressing itself in the modern world.
Salman Rushdie
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The USA approach looks like bullying because it is.
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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It may be that the books that were best liked in your lifetime are not the ones that are best liked 100 years later.
Salman Rushdie
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For every snake, there is a ladder for every ladder,a snake
Salman Rushdie
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Some people are paralyzed by the consciousness of death, other people live with it.... The fatwa certainly made me think about it a lot more than I ever had. I guess I know I'm going to die, but then, so are you.
Salman Rushdie
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There is no magic on earth strong enough to wipe out the legacies of one's parents.
Salman Rushdie
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Free societies are societies in motion, and with motion comes friction.
Salman Rushdie
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A man is sane only to the extent that he subscribes to a previously-agreed construction of reality.
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