Salman Rushdie Quotes
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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.
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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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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.
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In Iran, fundamentalism was fuelled to an extent by the regime of the Shah being supported by the West.
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Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts.
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Sometimes writing a novel is not unlike having a baby. You'd have to ask a female novelist to compare the pain.
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I don't think there is a need for an entity like God in my life.
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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.
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I've never rejected the world I came from. To be rejected by it is horrible.
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If Woody Allen were a Muslim, he'd be dead by now.
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Our lives are not what we deserve; they are, let us agree, in many ways deficient.
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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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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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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.
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In the experience of art, time seems not to exist.
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Bin Laden was born filthy rich and died in a rich man's house, which he had painstakingly built to the highest specifications.
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Hyperrealism can create an atmosphere of surrealism because nobody sees the world in such detail.
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I'm a reader of Chinese literature, I like their films, but also: I've had great difficulty getting my work published in China; very little of it has been published there. The first two attempts to have all of my work published, for instance, were refused without any reason ever being given.
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I'm a world expert on superhero comics. I think maybe only Michael Chabon knows more than me.
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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.
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Children like being a little scared, but they don't want to be disturbed.
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I don't like books that play to the gallery, but I've become more concerned with telling a story as clearly and engagingly as I can.
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Writers shouldn't have lives that are interesting. It gets in the way of your work.
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Cruelty is not a literary value.