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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My children are English, and both of their mothers were English.
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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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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 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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If bigots behave like bigots, it's not a huge surprise.
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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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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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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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A mature society understands that at the heart of democracy is argument.
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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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Original thought, original artistic expression is by its very nature questioning, irreverent, iconoclastic.
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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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What happened in Pakistan was that people were told: You're all Muslim, so now you're a country. As we saw in 1971 with the Bangladesh secession, the answer to that was: 'Oh no, we're not.'
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Free societies are societies in motion, and with motion comes friction.
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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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War used to be something you could stand on the nearby hill and watch. Now we have total war; everybody's in it. We have total economics as well. Everything affects everybody. The Malaysian currency shakes, and people around the world are seriously affected.