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It doesn't matter whether characters are real people or not if they're not vivid on the page, then the reader doesn't care about them that much, and, if the reader doesn't care about them that much, then they don't care what happens to them.

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
Whether
Doesn
Happens
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Vivid
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More quotes by Salman Rushdie

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Religion is responsible for a lot of the problems in the history of the world and it's not something that I practice or recommend, but to each his own.
Salman Rushdie
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Hyperrealism can create an atmosphere of surrealism because nobody sees the world in such detail.
Salman Rushdie
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I'm not a prophet, but I always thought it was natural for dictatorships to fall. I remember in 1989, two months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, had you said it was going to happen no one would have believed you. The system seemed powerful and unbreakable. Suddenly overnight it blew away like dust.
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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Religion, a mediaeval form of unreason, when combined with modern weaponry becomes a real threat to our freedoms.
Salman Rushdie
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You can't have modern states based on ideas which have been out of date for a thousand years.
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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She saw him fracture into rainbow colors through the prism of her love.
Salman Rushdie
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If by some bizarre chance there turns out to be a god [...], I'm willing to bet he's an atheist too.
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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Doubt, it seems to me, is the central condition of a human being in the twentieth century.
Salman Rushdie
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Well, we're still in the middle of it. And it doesn't show any sign of going away. And these attacks that were - that seemed so odd at the time, with Satanic Verses, because we didn't have any context for this. You know, where did that come from? It seemed to come out of nowhere.
Salman Rushdie
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The Chinese are good at repression and can be pretty ruthless about it.
Salman Rushdie
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A novel, I think, is partly about the contemporary and partly about the eternal, and it's the balance of that that's difficult to achieve.
Salman Rushdie
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As I look back, I feel a touch of pride at my younger self's dedication to literature, which gave him the strength of mind to resist the blandishments of the enemies of promise. The sirens of ad-land sang sweetly and seductively, but I thought of Odysseus lashing himself to the mast of his ship, and somehow stayed on course.
Salman Rushdie
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People must be protected from prejudice against their person. But people cannot be protected from prejudice against their ideas - because otherwise we're all done.
Salman Rushdie
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If you were standing next to the prophet on the mountain, would you have seen the archangel? And my answer to that was probably not, even though it's supposed to be a really big archangel. He describes it as - the Archangel Gabriel as standing on the horizon and filling the sky. That's a big angel.
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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The novel does not seek to establish a privileged language but it insists upon the freedom to portray and analyze the struggle between the different contestants for such privileges.
Salman Rushdie
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I for one don't need a supreme sacred arbiter in order to be a moral being.
Salman Rushdie