Salman Rushdie Quotes
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One of the things I do take some pride in is that if you had never read an article about my life, if you knew nothing about me, except that my books were being set in front of you to read, and if you were to read those books in sequence, I don't think you would say to yourself, 'Oh my God, something terrible happened to this writer in 1989.'
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Friendships are the family we make - not the one we inherit. I've always been someone to whom friendship, elective affinities, is as important as family.
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The Christian Coalition is still about Christianity, even if it's an idea of Christianity that many Christians might not go along with.
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If bigots behave like bigots, it's not a huge surprise.
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I have always thought, the secret purpose of the book tour is to make the writer hate the book he's written. And, as a result, drive him to write another book.
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My children are English, and both of their mothers were English.
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What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.
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The only way to find out why someone decides to engage in armed combat is to look at their individual personality.
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I've always prided myself on my discipline as a writer. I do it like a job. I get up in the morning and go to my desk.
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I'm not a very big fan of 'Slumdog Millionaire.' I think it's visually brilliant. But I have problems with the story line. I find the storyline unconvincing.
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In the movies, the writer is just the servant, the employee.
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The only people who see the whole picture are the ones who step outside the frame.
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One of the problems with defending free speech is you often have to defend people that you find to be outrageous and unpleasant and disgusting.
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When you have children, your perspective on the parent-child relationship alters.
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Self-censorship is a lie to yourself; if you are going to be trying to seriously create art, to create literary art, and you decide to hold back, to censor yourself, then you are a fool to yourself and it would be better that you kept your mouth shut and did not speak.
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Original thought, original artistic expression is by its very nature questioning, irreverent, iconoclastic.
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Rock n' roll was a kid when I was a kid.
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There is no such thing as perfect security, only varying levels of insecurity.
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Most of what matters in your life takes place in your absence.
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Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts.
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Free societies are societies in motion, and with motion comes friction.
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A mature society understands that at the heart of democracy is argument.
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As a writer, one of the things we all learned from the movies was a kind of compression that didn't exist before people were used to watching films. For instance, if you wanted to write a flashback in a novel, you once had to really contextualize it a lot, to set it up. Now, readers know exactly what you're doing. Close-ups, too.
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In Iran, fundamentalism was fuelled to an extent by the regime of the Shah being supported by the West.