Salman Rushdie Quotes
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Nothing is unfilmable.
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The miniatures of the Mughal period are really the pinnacle of Indian artistic achievement. And not a single one of those paintings is done by an individual artist.
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Chekhov is this poet of melancholy and isolation and of wishing you were somewhere else than where you are.
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In general, writers shouldn't be killed for what they write, though I can think of exceptions.
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Every time you finish a book, you have a terrible feeling that there's just never going to be another one. But fortunately, so far, the next one has always shown up.
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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 West was involved in toppling the Mossadegh government. That ultimately led to the Iranian revolution.
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If I were dead, then nobody in England would have to fuss about the cost of my security and whether or not I merited such special treatment for so long.
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A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return.
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Airport security exists to guard us against terrorist attacks.
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The field of the novel is very rich. If you're a composer, you're well aware of the history of composition, and you are trying to make your music part of that history. You're not ahistorical. In the same way, I think, if you write now, you are writing in the historical context of what the novel has been and what possibilities it has revealed.
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As a writer, one of the things we all learned from the movies was a kind of compression that didn't exist before people were used to watching films. For instance, if you wanted to write a flashback in a novel, you once had to really contextualize it a lot, to set it up. Now, readers know exactly what you're doing. Close-ups, too.
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I've met the Dalai Lama briefly, but I would probably say my grandfather was the wisest person I ever met. He was my mother's father, an Indian, a family doctor, and very unlike me in that he was deeply religious.
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It's Kennedy's war, Vietnam. Lyndon Johnson got all the flak, but it's Kennedy's war.
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One of the strange things about violent and authoritarian regimes is they don't like the glare of negative publicity.
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Perhaps because my relationship with my father went through such a long, bumpy time, it's been very important for me to work to try to keep lines of communication open between my sons and myself to try to avoid my father's mistakes. At least if you're making mistakes, make different mistakes.
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When you start writing about the stuff that is the central experience of your own life, you can talk about whatever you want, in whatever way you want.
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The enemy for the fanatic is pleasure, which makes it extremely important to continue to indulge in pleasure. Dance madly. That is how you get rid of terrorism.
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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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You want all your books to stick around after you've gone.
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Have you noticed the physical resemblance between Imran Khan and Gaddafi? If you were making a movie of the life of Gaddafi and you wanted a slightly better-looking version of Gaddafi, you might cast Imran Khan.
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Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.
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When people do the cowardly thing, it's not about respect, it's about fear.
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Many men start being friendly with women because they are trying to seduce them. I'm not trying to seduce them. I just like hanging out with them.