Until you know who you are you can’t write.
SALMAN RUSHDIELanguage is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true.
More Salman Rushdie Quotes
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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 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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You can’t have modern states based on ideas which have been out of date for a thousand years.
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A poet’s work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.
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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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What kind of Christmas present would Jesus ask Santa for?
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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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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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Between the adored and the adorer falls the shadow.
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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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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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The only people who see the whole picture,’ he murmured, ‘are the ones who step out of the frame.
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Self-censorship is a lie to yourself; if you are going to be trying to seriously create art, to create literary art, and you decide to hold back, to censor yourself, then you are a fool to yourself and it would be better that you kept your mouth shut and did not speak.
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Faith without doubt is addiction.
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From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable.
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Where there is no belief, there is no blasphemy.
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What’s real and what’s true aren’t necessarily the same.
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I stand with Charlie Hebdo, as we all must, to defend the art of satire.
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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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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.
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Stories in families are colossally important. Every family has stories: some funny, some proud, some embarrassing, some shameful. Knowing them is proof of belonging to the family.
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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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Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true.
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My horizon’s have shrunk and I have only endings to write.
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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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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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