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I don't think there is a need for an entity like God in my life.
Salman Rushdie -
In this world without quiet corners, there can be no easy escapes from history, from hullabaloo, from terrible, unquiet fuss.
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 -
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.
Salman Rushdie -
I accept there are people out there who don't like me. I don't like them.
Salman Rushdie -
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.
Salman Rushdie -
Our lives are not what we deserve; they are, let us agree, in many ways deficient.
Salman Rushdie -
A mature society understands that at the heart of democracy is argument.
Salman Rushdie
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At the height of the British Empire very few English novels were written that dealt with British power. It's extraordinary that at the moment in which England was the global superpower the subject of British power appeared not to interest most writers.
Salman Rushdie -
In Iran, fundamentalism was fuelled to an extent by the regime of the Shah being supported by the West.
Salman Rushdie -
A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return.
Salman Rushdie -
If Woody Allen were a Muslim, he'd be dead by now.
Salman Rushdie -
The Koran was revealed at a time of great change in the Arab world, the seventh-century shift from a matriarchal nomadic culture to an urban patriarchal system.
Salman Rushdie -
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.
Salman Rushdie
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Mo Yan is the Chinese equivalent of the Soviet Russian apparatchik writer Mikhail Sholokhov: a patsy of the regime.
Salman Rushdie -
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.
Salman Rushdie -
Islam is unusual in that it's the only one of the great world religions which was born inside recorded history. That there's an enormous amount of factual historical record about the life of a prophet and about social conditions in Arabia at that time. So it's possible to look at the origin of Islam in a scholarly way.
Salman Rushdie -
There is no right in the world not to be offended. That right simply doesn’t exist. In a free society, an open society, people have strong opinions, and these opinions very often clash. In a democracy, we have to learn to deal with this. And this is true about novels, it’s true about cartoons, it’s true about all these products.
Salman Rushdie -
One of the strange things about violent and authoritarian regimes is they don't like the glare of negative publicity.
Salman Rushdie -
British society has never been cleansed of the filth of imperialism.
Salman Rushdie
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Cruelty is not a literary value.
Salman Rushdie -
Names, once they are in common use, quickly become mere sounds, their etymology being buried, like so many of the earth's marvels, beneath the dust of habit.
Salman Rushdie -
Hyperrealism can create an atmosphere of surrealism because nobody sees the world in such detail.
Salman Rushdie -
I'm a world expert on superhero comics. I think maybe only Michael Chabon knows more than me.
Salman Rushdie