An attack upon our ability to tell stories is not just censorship – it is a crime against our nature as human beings.
SALMAN RUSHDIEI’ve been worrying about God a little bit lately. It seems like he’s been in a bad mood. And I think it has to do with the quality of lovers he’s been getting.
More Salman Rushdie Quotes
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We are the storytelling animal.
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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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If you’re offended, it’s your problem.
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Something was badly amiss with the spiritual life of the planet, Too many demons inside people claiming to believe in God.
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Between the adored and the adorer falls the shadow.
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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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We all owe death a life.
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I don’t dictate to anyone what to believe and what not to. And I don’t want that to be dictated to me either.
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Of course, there is nothing intrinsic linking any religion with any act of violence. The crusades don’t prove that Christianity was violent. The Inquisition doesn’t prove that Christianity tortures people. But that Christianity did torture people.
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Perhaps the story you finish is never the one you begin.
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Our lives, our stories, flowed into one another’s, were no longer our own, individual, discrete.
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Until you know who you are you can’t write.
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I admit it: above all things, I fear absurdity.
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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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One of the strange things about violent and authoritarian regimes is they don’t like the glare of negative publicity.
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Reality is a question of perspective.
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What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.
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Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.
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Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true.
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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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For every snake, there is a ladder; for every ladder, a snake.
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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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No, I don’t think it’s fair to label Islam ‘violent.’ But I will say that to my knowledge, no writer has ever gone into hiding for criticizing the Amish.
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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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Too many people spouting too many words, and in the end those words will turn to bullets and stones.
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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.
SALMAN RUSHDIE