Salman Rushdie Quotes
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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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The thing about literature is that, yes, there are kind of tides of fashion, you know; people come in and out of fashion; writers who are very celebrated fall into, you know, people you know stop reading them, and then it comes back again.
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It may be that the books that were best liked in your lifetime are not the ones that are best liked 100 years later.
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I'm definitely post-something.
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Children are the vessels into which adults pour their poison.
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Censorship is the thing that stops you doing what you want to do, and what writers want to talk about is what they do, not what stops them doing it.
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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 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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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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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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When you write, you write out of your best self. Everything else drops away.
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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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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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I don't think people cry reading 'Midnight's Children,' but a lot of people seem to cry watching the movie.
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The writers of the French enlightenment had deliberately used blasphemy as a weapon, refusing to accept the power of the Church to set limiting points on thought.
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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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Nobody wants to read a 600 page book in which the author is fabulous throughout.
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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.
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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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The West sees Iran as an important force in the gulf.
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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.
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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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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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I'm a big-city boy. What I like is big cities. It's not just what I like. It's what I write about.