Salman Rushdie Quotes
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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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The West should be tougher on Pakistan. It is trying to play both ends against the middle - to look like the friend of the revolutionaries on the one hand and a friend of the West in the fight against terrorism. It can't be both things.
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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 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 West sees Iran as an important force in the gulf.
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When you write, you write out of your best self. Everything else drops away.
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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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Nobody wants to read a 600 page book in which the author is fabulous throughout.
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This paranoid Islam, which blames outsider, 'infidels', for all the ills of Muslim societies, and whose proposed remedy is the closing of those societies to the rival project of modernity, is presently the fastest growing version of Islam in the world.
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I'm definitely post-something.
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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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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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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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Certainly, the Hollywood cinema, there's almost nothing of interest coming out of there.
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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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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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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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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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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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It's obvious that I come down on the side of free speech for anybody's work.
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When you are making an independent film, money is never an issue.
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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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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.