Salman Rushdie Quotes
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One of the reasons my name is Rushdie is that my father was an admirer of Ibn Rush'd, the 12th century Arab philosopher known as Averroes in the West. In his time, he was making the non-literalist case for interpreting the Koran.
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It's obvious that I come down on the side of free speech for anybody's work.
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Sometimes you find your voice by trying to write like people, and sometimes you find it by trying to write unlike people.
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Children are the vessels into which adults pour their poison.
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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.
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When you are making an independent film, money is never an issue.
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The suicide bomber's imagination leads him to believe in a brilliant act of heroism, when in fact he is simply blowing himself up pointlessly and taking other people's lives.
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In television, the 60-minute series, 'The Wire' and 'Mad Men' and so on, the writer is the primary creative artist.
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Our lives teach us who we are.
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If Turkey wants to join Europe, it will have to become a European country, and that might take a long time.
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In today's U.S., it's possible for almost anyone - women, gays, African-Americans, Jews - to run for, and be elected to, high office.
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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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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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Many of us didn't believe in the image of bin Laden as a wandering Old Man of the Mountains, living on plants and insects in an inhospitable cave somewhere on the porous Pakistan-Afghan border.
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Doubt, it seems to me, is the central condition of a human being in the twentieth century.
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If you have children, you worry about the world you're leaving them.
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Thomas Pynchon looks exactly like Thomas Pynchon should look. He is tall, he wears lumberjack shirts and blue jeans. He has Albert Einstein white hair and Bugs Bunny front teeth.
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The publishing of a book is a worldwide event. The attempt to suppress a book is a worldwide event.
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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.
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The West sees Iran as an important force in the gulf.
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An attack upon our ability to tell stories is not just censorship - it is a crime against our nature as human beings.
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There was a series called 'Game of Thrones' which was very popular here in the United States, a post-Tolkien kind of thing. It was garbage, yet very addictive garbage - because there's lots of violence, all the women take their clothes off all the time, and it's kind of fun.
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If my child had prejudice in his head, I'd be ashamed. I would see it as my failure as a parent.
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In early Islam, it was an absolute tenet that the prophet was not to be worshipped. The prophet was a messenger. And one of the things that's happened in Islam is this cult of the prophet, which to my view is counter to the original tradition.