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I write books I'd enjoy reading, I'm the reader standing behind my shoulder.
Salman Rushdie -
The Muslim population in India is, largely speaking, not radicalised. From the beginning, they were always very secular-minded.
Salman Rushdie
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The people suffering most from the Taliban were Afghans.
Salman Rushdie -
What I've always tried to find in my books are points at which the private lives of the characters, and also my own, intersect with the public life of the culture.
Salman Rushdie -
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.
Salman Rushdie -
Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory.
Salman Rushdie -
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.
Salman Rushdie -
Doubt, it seems to me, is the central condition of a human being in the twentieth century.
Salman Rushdie
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It's true that the human body is more vulnerable than the products of the human mind.
Salman Rushdie -
There is a widespread difficulty in the Muslim world, which has to do with how the people are taught about examining their own history. A whole range of stuff has been placed off limits.
Salman Rushdie -
It's so disappointing, to put it mildly, that people know so much about my life. Because it means that they're always trying to look at my books in terms of my life.
Salman Rushdie -
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.
Salman Rushdie -
I don't like books that seem to want to teach me things. Which is not to say that one doesn't learn from books – but you do your own learning in your own way.
Salman Rushdie -
It's one thing to say, 'I don't like what you said to me and I find it rude and offensive,' but the moment you threaten violence in return, you've taken it to another level, where you lose whatever credibility you had.
Salman Rushdie
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Airport security exists to guard us against terrorist attacks.
Salman Rushdie -
The Republicans were not always insane. They might've had politics I didn't agree with, but they weren't always actually certifiable.
Salman Rushdie -
You don't fight radical conservatism with not-quite-so radical conservatism.
Salman Rushdie -
The Chinese are good at repression and can be pretty ruthless about it.
Salman Rushdie -
This is going to make me sound ancient, but I remember Juhu Beach when there weren't any buildings on it. You'd go through countryside and arrive at this amazing beach. I remember driving from Delhi to the Qutab Minar through countryside. Mehrauli was a little village - that's all gone.
Salman Rushdie -
Originality is dangerous.
Salman Rushdie
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We all dream things into being; you imagine yourself having a child, and then you have a child. An inventor will think of something in his mind and then make it actual. So things are often passing from the imagined realm into the real world.
Salman Rushdie -
I am clearly vulnerable to these more passionate and volatile unstable relationships. I am trying to not be so vulnerable.
Salman Rushdie -
The First Amendment defends all forms of speech including hate speech, which is why groups like Ku Klux Klan are allowed to utter their poisonous remarks.
Salman Rushdie -
It is literature which for me opened the mysterious and decisive doors of imagination and understanding. To see the way others see. To think the way others think. And above all, to feel.
Salman Rushdie