Salman Rushdie Quotes
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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.
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The problem of telling contemporary history is that your message gets outdated.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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The only way of living in a free society is to feel that you have the right to say and do stuff.
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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 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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In general, writers shouldn't be killed for what they write, though I can think of exceptions.
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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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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 you actually want to change your world, there is a better way of doing it than blowing yourself up.
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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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One of the extraordinary things about human events is that the unthinkable becomes thinkable.
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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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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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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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When you write, you write out of your best self. Everything else drops away.
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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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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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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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Vertigo is the conflict between the fear of falling and the desire to fall.
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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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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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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.
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Broad-mindedness is related to tolerance; open-mindedness is the sibling of peace.