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Doris Lessing really doesn't care what the critics say. In fact, she orders her publishers not to send her the reviews and gets cross with them if they do because she doesn't want that in her head. She's going where she's going, and that's where she wants to go.
Salman Rushdie -
A novel, I think, is partly about the contemporary and partly about the eternal, and it's the balance of that that's difficult to achieve.
Salman Rushdie
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I think that England made a very big, historical mistake to allow itself to become the kind of terrorist capital of the world.
Salman Rushdie -
The thing I really like about Twitter is the speed with which information reaches me. You find out things from Twitter long before they're on the news. That, I think, is valuable.
Salman Rushdie -
The accidents of my life have given me the ability to make stories in which different parts of the world are brought together, sometimes harmoniously, sometimes in conflict, and sometimes both - usually both. The difficulty in these stories is that if you write about everywhere you can end up writing about nowhere.
Salman Rushdie -
If you live in free countries, you don't have to spend all your life arguing about freedom because it is all around you. It seems redundant to make a lot of noise about something when, in fact, there it is. But if someone tries to remove it, it becomes important for you to formulate your own defenses of it.
Salman Rushdie -
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.
Salman Rushdie -
Normally when I read, I don't like music playing.
Salman Rushdie
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When thought becomes excessively painful, action is the finest remedy.
Salman Rushdie -
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.
Salman Rushdie -
The reason why books endure is because there are enough people who like them. It's the only reason why books last.
Salman Rushdie -
If you actually want to change your world, there is a better way of doing it than blowing yourself up.
Salman Rushdie -
When you write, you write out of your best self. Everything else drops away.
Salman Rushdie -
I've never seen anywhere in the world as beautiful as Kashmir. It has something to do with the fact that the valley is very small and the mountains are very big, so you have this miniature countryside surrounded by the Himalayas, and it's just spectacular. And it's true, the people are very beautiful too.
Salman Rushdie
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One of the extraordinary things about human events is that the unthinkable becomes thinkable.
Salman Rushdie -
The only thing worse than a bad review from the Ayatollah Khomeini would be a good review from the Ayatollah Khomeini.
Salman Rushdie -
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.
Salman Rushdie -
An attack upon our ability to tell stories is not just censorship - it is a crime against our nature as human beings.
Salman Rushdie -
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.
Salman Rushdie -
Two things form the bedrock of any open society - freedom of expression and rule of law. If you don't have those things, you don't have a free country.
Salman Rushdie
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The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas - uncertainty, progress, change - into crimes.
Salman Rushdie -
The only way of living in a free society is to feel that you have the right to say and do stuff.
Salman Rushdie -
Broad-mindedness is related to tolerance; open-mindedness is the sibling of peace.
Salman Rushdie -
Matthew Wiener on 'Mad Men' writes the entire series before they start shooting, and if you have that, then what you can do with character and story is not at all unlike what you can do in a novel.
Salman Rushdie