Salman Rushdie Quotes
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Names, once they are in common use, quickly become mere sounds, their etymology being buried, like so many of the earth's marvels, beneath the dust of habit.
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Mo Yan is the Chinese equivalent of the Soviet Russian apparatchik writer Mikhail Sholokhov: a patsy of the regime.
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I've never rejected the world I came from. To be rejected by it is horrible.
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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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British society has never been cleansed of the filth of imperialism.
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I am not in the business of suppressing books.
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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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Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.
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Speaking as somebody with three sisters and a very largely female Muslim family, there is not a single woman I know in my family or in their friends who would have accepted the wearing of a veil.
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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.
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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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You want all your books to stick around after you've gone.
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Writers have been in terrible situations and have yet managed to produce extraordinary work.
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I was 21 in 1968, so I'm as much a child of the '60s as is possible to be. In those years the subject of religion had really almost disappeared; the idea that religion was going to be a major force in the life of our societies, in the West anyway, would have seemed absurd in 1968.
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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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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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Many writers who have had to deal with the subject of atrocity can't face it head-on.
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Memory is a way of telling you what's important to you.
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Nothing is unfilmable.
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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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'The Satanic Verses' was denied the ordinary life of a novel. It became something smaller and uglier: an insult.
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The thing about literature is that, yes, there are kind of tides of fashion, you know; people come in and out of fashion; writers who are very celebrated fall into, you know, people you know stop reading them, and then it comes back again.
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A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.