Salman Rushdie Quotes
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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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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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I've never rejected the world I came from. To be rejected by it is horrible.
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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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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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Most of what matters in your life takes place in your absence.
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In the experience of art, time seems not to exist.
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When you have children, your perspective on the parent-child relationship alters.
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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'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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Hyperrealism can create an atmosphere of surrealism because nobody sees the world in such detail.
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If Woody Allen were a Muslim, he'd be dead by now.
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I don't think there is a need for an entity like God in my life.
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Such is the miraculous nature of the future of exiles: what is first uttered in the impotence of an overheated apartment becomes the fate of nations.
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I am not in the business of suppressing books.
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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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I think if we wish to live in any kind of a moral universe, we must hold the perpetrators of violence responsible for the violence they perpetrate. It's very simple. The criminal is responsible for the crime.
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I am on Facebook, but mainly as a way to spy on my children. I find out more about them from their Facebook pages than from what they tell 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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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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It is often said by religious people that without its framework, there is no sense of right or wrong. My view is that religion comes after ethics.
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You can take the boy out of Bombay; you can't take Bombay out of the boy, you know.
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Cruelty is not a literary value.