It is very, very easy not to be offended by a book. You just have to shut it.
SALMAN RUSHDIEIf you actually want to change your world, there is a better way of doing it than blowing yourself up.
More Salman Rushdie Quotes
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I have always thought that these two ways of talking, one is the fantastic, the fable, the fairy tale, and the other being history, the scholarly study of what happened, I think they’re both amazing ways to understand human nature.
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Free speech is not just free speech for people you admire. It’s also for people who you think of as reprehensible.
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What’s real and what’s true aren’t necessarily the same.
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For every snake, there is a ladder; for every ladder, a snake.
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The world, somebody wrote, is the place we prove real by dying in it.
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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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Science fiction is always a vehicle for ideas. It’s the form which allows either movies or books to be an exploration of how we should live.
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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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We were language’s magpies by nature, stealing whatever sounded bright and shiny.
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We cannot allow religious hooligans to place limiting points on thought.
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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.
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Between the adored and the adorer falls the shadow.
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Respect for religion’ has become a code phrase meaning ‘fear of religion.’ Religions, like all other ideas, deserve criticism, satire, and, yes, our fearless disrespect.
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I didn’t become a writer to write about me.
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But there’s one thing we must all be clear about: terrorism is not the pursuit of legitimate goals by some sort of illegitimate means. Whatever the murderers may be trying to achieve, creating a better world certainly isn’t one of their goals. Instead they are out to murder innocent people.
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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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One of the strange things about violent and authoritarian regimes is they don’t like the glare of negative publicity.
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Masks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull.
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Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.
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I have never really thought of myself as a writer about religion. And I think one of the things that happened to me as a result of all that is that I think it did for some people, many people, obscure the kind of writer that I actually am.
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From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable.
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I write books I’d enjoy reading, I’m the reader standing behind my shoulder.
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To understand just one life you have to swallow the world do you wonder, then, that I was a heavy child?
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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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Once you put a thought into the world, it can be disagreed with, but it can’t be unthought.
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Among the great struggles of man-good/evil, reason/unreason, etc.-there is also this mighty conflict between the fantasy of Home and the fantasy of Away, the dream of roots and the mirage of the journey.
SALMAN RUSHDIE