Salman Rushdie Quotes
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I don't like books that seem to want to teach me things. Which is not to say that one doesn't learn from books – but you do your own learning in your own way.
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There is a widespread difficulty in the Muslim world, which has to do with how the people are taught about examining their own history. A whole range of stuff has been placed off limits.
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Whenever I write something, I always want to make sure that what I write is defensible.
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I am clearly vulnerable to these more passionate and volatile unstable relationships. I am trying to not be so vulnerable.
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The Republicans were not always insane. They might've had politics I didn't agree with, but they weren't always actually certifiable.
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The great concern is that year after year, rising numbers of journalists are being killed in pursuit of their work. They are increasingly seen as not being neutral but rather as combatants by one side or the other.
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The First Amendment defends all forms of speech including hate speech, which is why groups like Ku Klux Klan are allowed to utter their poisonous remarks.
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It's so disappointing, to put it mildly, that people know so much about my life. Because it means that they're always trying to look at my books in terms of my life.
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You don't fight radical conservatism with not-quite-so radical conservatism.
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Originality is dangerous.
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My grandmother was very fierce and gruff. She was quite small, but she was very wide.
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Thomas Pynchon looks exactly like Thomas Pynchon should look. He is tall, he wears lumberjack shirts and blue jeans. He has Albert Einstein white hair and Bugs Bunny front teeth.
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It is literature which for me opened the mysterious and decisive doors of imagination and understanding. To see the way others see. To think the way others think. And above all, to feel.
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The suicide bomber's imagination leads him to believe in a brilliant act of heroism, when in fact he is simply blowing himself up pointlessly and taking other people's lives.
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It matters, it always matters, to name rubbish as rubbish … to do otherwise is to legitimize it.
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It seems that the right of freedom of speech that was enshrined in numerous constitutions is now under attack by religious institutions.
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If the creative artist worries if he will still be free tomorrow, then he will not be free today.
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The glamour of being forbidden must not be underestimated.
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Be sure that you go to the author to get at his meaning, not to find yours.
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We cannot allow religious hooligans to place limiting points on thought.
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The frustrating part of being tagged 'controversial' is people go looking for trouble where there isn't any to look for.
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I'm not a prophet, but I always thought it was natural for dictatorships to fall. I remember in 1989, two months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, had you said it was going to happen no one would have believed you. The system seemed powerful and unbreakable. Suddenly overnight it blew away like dust.
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Anyone who has had the experience of going through American security checks knows the purpose of these checks is not to make you safer; it's just to annoy you.
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One of the reasons my name is Rushdie is that my father was an admirer of Ibn Rush'd, the 12th century Arab philosopher known as Averroes in the West. In his time, he was making the non-literalist case for interpreting the Koran.