Salman Rushdie Quotes
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If the culture shifts, if people think differently about women, the art will shift, too. You can't ask art to make social change. It's not what it's for.
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When 'Midnight's Children' came out, people in the West tended to respond to the fantasy elements in the novel, to praise it in those terms. In India, people read it like a history book.
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If you actually want to change your world, there is a better way of doing it than blowing yourself up.
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The problem of telling contemporary history is that your message gets outdated.
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Throughout human history, the apostles of purity, those who have claimed to possess a total explanation, have wrought havoc among mere mixed-up human beings.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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If terrorism is to be defeated, the world of Islam must take on board the secularist-humanist principles on which the modern is based, and without which Muslim countries' freedom will remain a distant dream.
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I used to say, 'There is a God-shaped hole in me.' For a long time I stressed the absence, the hole. Now I find it is the shape which has become more important.
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The reason why books endure is because there are enough people who like them. It's the only reason why books last.
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I used to write a monthly column for the 'New York Times' syndicate. But I stopped because I found it really hard to have one extreme opinion a month. I don't know how these columnists have two or three ideas a week; I was having difficulty having 12 things to say a year.
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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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I'll tell you what divorce hasn't taught me. It didn't teach me not to get married again.
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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.
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The only thing worse than a bad review from the Ayatollah Khomeini would be a good review from the Ayatollah Khomeini.
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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 world is a very abnormal place.
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I'm definitely post-something.
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In the real world, immeasurable hurt is caused by terrorists based in Pakistan who attack countries like India.
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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.