Salman Rushdie Quotes
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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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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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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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If bigots behave like bigots, it's not a huge surprise.
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The only people who see the whole picture are the ones who step outside the frame.
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When you have children, your perspective on the parent-child relationship alters.
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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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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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Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts.
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Most of what matters in your life takes place in your absence.
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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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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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There is no such thing as perfect security, only varying levels of insecurity.
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The enemy for the fanatic is pleasure, which makes it extremely important to continue to indulge in pleasure. Dance madly. That is how you get rid of terrorism.
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I accept there are people out there who don't like me. I don't like them.
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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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There are two things in Indian history - one is the incredible optimism and potential of the place, and the other is the betrayal of that potential - for example, corruption. Those two strands intertwine through the whole of Indian history, and maybe not just Indian history.
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In this world without quiet corners, there can be no easy escapes from history, from hullabaloo, from terrible, unquiet fuss.
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If I had simply wanted to trade on an insult to Islam, I could have done it in a sentence rather than writing a 250,000-word novel, a work of fiction.
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If Woody Allen were a Muslim, he'd be dead by now.