Salman Rushdie Quotes
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If you're offended, it's your problem.
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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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In the real world, immeasurable hurt is caused by terrorists based in Pakistan who attack countries like India.
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If you take a look at history, you will find that the understanding of what is good and evil has always existed before the individual religions. The religions were only invented by people afterwards, in order to express this idea.
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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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In any authoritarian society, the possessor of power dictates, and if you try and step outside, he will come after you. This is equally true of Sovietism, of China and of Iran, and in our time it has happened a lot in Islam. The point is that it's worse when the authoritarianism is supported by something supernatural.
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If you have children, you worry about the world you're leaving them.
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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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It's obvious that I come down on the side of free speech for anybody's work.
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I think the veil is a way of taking power away from women.
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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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American literature has always been immigrant.
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The question I'm always asking myself is: are we masters or victims? Do we make history, or does history make us? Do we shape the world, or are we just shaped by it? The question of do we have agency in our lives or whether we are just passive victims of events is, I think, a great question, and one that I have always tried to ask.
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Sometimes I think that when people become famous, there's a public perception that they are not human beings any more. They don't have feelings; they don't get hurt; you can act and say as you like about them.
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Certainly, poverty and economic decline have a lot to do with the so-called rage of Islam. You've got all these young men in countries which are economically in bad shape. The idea that they might be able to make a good living and get married and have a family, a decent life, seems very remote to a lot of people in a lot of the world.
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I grew up reading 'The Jungle Books' and loving them.
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I saw Quentin Tarantino's 'Django Unchained,' and you could say a lot of things against it, but it was incredible fun. I don't like blood and gore, and I am very squeamish about violence, but Tarantino's violence is actually funny.
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Look at history. It's not the account of a species at peace.
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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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Discovery is fun. I am incredibly open to everything.
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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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When I'm writing a book, sentence by sentence, I'm not thinking theoretically. I'm just trying to work out the story from inside the characters I've got.
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I'm not saying I am never going to fall in love again, but there is no need to marry.
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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.