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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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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Rock n' roll was a kid when I was a kid.
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Writers have an opinion about the world and offer arguments about the world. They should offer contemplation.
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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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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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In the experience of art, time seems not to exist.
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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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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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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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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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Most of what matters in your life takes place in your absence.
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I am not in the business of suppressing books.
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Writers have been in terrible situations and have yet managed to produce extraordinary work.
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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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When you have children, your perspective on the parent-child relationship alters.
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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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I'm a world expert on superhero comics. I think maybe only Michael Chabon knows more than me.
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If Woody Allen were a Muslim, he'd be dead by now.
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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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The thing that always attracted me to New York was the sense of being in a place where a lot of people had a lot of stories not unlike mine. Everybody comes from somewhere else. Everyone's got a Polish grandmother, some kind of metamorphosis in their family circumstances. That's a very big thing - the experience of not living where you started.
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The gamble of literature is that I make the best work I can; the most truthful, the most representative of how I see things. I try and do that, and then I put it out there and say to you, 'What do you think?' I hope that you think well of it, obviously.