Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true.
SALMAN RUSHDIEWhere there is no belief, there is no blasphemy.
More Salman Rushdie Quotes
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I admit it: above all things, I fear absurdity.
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Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination and of the heart.
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In the waking dreams our societies permit, in our myths, our arts, our songs, we celebrate the nonbelongers, the different ones, the outlaws, the freaks.
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Until you know who you are you can’t write.
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What’s real and what’s true aren’t necessarily the same.
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The lessons one learns at school are not always the ones the school thinks it’s teaching.
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Literature is the one place in any society where, within the secrecy of our own heads, we can hear voices talking about everything in every possible way.
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Once you put a thought into the world, it can be disagreed with, but it can’t be unthought.
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The only people who see the whole picture,’ he murmured, ‘are the ones who step out of the frame.
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Liberate yourself, because no one else is going to liberate you.
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We have come to think of taking offence as a fundamental right. We value very little more highly than our rage, which gives us, in our opinion, the moral high ground. From there we can shoot down at our enemies and inflict heavy fatalities.
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Ignorantly is how we all fall in love; for it is a kind of fall. Closing our eyes, we leap from that cliff in hope of a soft landing. Nor is it always soft; but still, without that leap nobody comes to life.
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It seems that the right of freedom of speech that was enshrined in numerous constitutions is now under attack by religious institutions.
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He knew what he knew: that the real world was full of magic, so magical worlds could easily be real.
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It is very, very easy not to be offended by a book. You just have to shut it.
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Religion, a mediaeval form of unreason, when combined with modern weaponry becomes a real threat to our freedoms. This religious totalitarianism has caused a deadly mutation in the heart of Islam and we see the tragic consequences in Paris today.
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Only the foolish, blinded by language’s conventions, think of fire as red or gold. Fire is blue at it’s melancholy rim, green in it’s envious heart. It may burn white, or even, in it’s greatest rages, black.
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Every time you finish a book, you have a terrible feeling that there’s just never going to be another one. But fortunately, so far, the next one has always shown up.
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Perhaps the story you finish is never the one you begin.
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I think if we wish to live in any kind of a moral universe, we must hold the perpetrators of violence responsible for the violence they perpetrate. It’s very simple. The criminal is responsible for the crime.
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Reality is a question of perspective.
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What one writer can make in the solitude of one room is something no power can easily destroy.
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You can find shame in every house, burning in an ashtray, hanging framed upon a wall, covering a bed. But nobody notices it any more.
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Masks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull.
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You can’t have modern states based on ideas which have been out of date for a thousand years.
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What I do think is evident is that those countries in the world where Islamic extremism has recovered the most power, those are also the countries which are most disliked.
SALMAN RUSHDIE