Salman Rushdie Quotes
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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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I do not need the idea of God to explain the world I live in.
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England in a way is lucky. It's an island, so the frontiers are given by the sea.
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We are the storytelling animal.
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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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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 do think of Bombay as my hometown. Those are the streets I walked when I was learning to walk. And it's the place that my imagination has returned to more than anywhere else.
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We cannot allow religious hooligans to place limiting points on thought.
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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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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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I don't read my books, I write them. Once I've finished the many years it usually takes me to write them, I can't bear to read them, because I've spent too long with them already. I'm not advertising them very well, am I?
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I did a lot of student acting when I was young.
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But there's one thing we must all be clear about: terrorism is not the pursuit of legitimate goals by some sort of illegitimate means. Whatever the murderers may be trying to achieve, creating a better world certainly isn't one of their goals. Instead they are out to murder innocent people.
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I think, in a written novel, the way in which you play with the readers' emotion or the way in which you engage the readers' emotions can be very indirect. You could come at it through irony or comedy, etcetera, and you could capture people's sympathies and feelings kind of by stealth if you like.
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What kind of God is it who's upset by a cartoon in Danish?
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There is nothing intrinsic linking any religion with any act of violence. The crusades don't prove that Christianity was violent. The Inquisition doesn't prove that Christianity tortures people. But that Christianity did torture people.
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The Muslim population in India is, largely speaking, not radicalised. From the beginning, they were always very secular-minded.
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There's a lot of conflict and darkness inside everybody's family. We all pretend to outsiders that it's not so, but behind locked doors, there are usually high emotions running.
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Someone asked me if I was afraid to write my memoirs. I told him: 'We have to stop drawing up accounts of fear! We live in a society in which people are allowed to tell their story, and that is what I do.'
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One of the things I've learnt is not to depend on there being a woman in your life to make it work. I love my work, I love my children, I've got wonderful friends, you know, I have a nice life.
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I remember when I was young, many cities in the Muslim world were cosmopolitan cities with a lot of culture.
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You can't have modern states based on ideas which have been out of date for a thousand years.
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I would argue that religion comes from a desire to get to the questions of, 'Where do we come from?' and 'How shall we live?' And I would say I don't need religion to answer those questions.
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I do have a lot of time for people in my life, and friendship is a very important subject for me. I think I'm unusual among the writers I know in that respect.