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.
SALMAN RUSHDIEReligion is responsible for a lot of the problems in the history of the world and it’s not something that I practice or recommend, but to each his own.
More Salman Rushdie Quotes
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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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Once you put a thought into the world, it can be disagreed with, but it can’t be unthought.
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In the cookie of life, friends are the chocolate chips.
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Masks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull.
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I write books I’d enjoy reading, I’m the reader standing behind my shoulder.
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One of the things a writer is for is to say the unsayable, speak the unspeakable and ask difficult questions.
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If you actually want to change your world, there is a better way of doing it than blowing yourself up.
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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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For every snake, there is a ladder; for every ladder, a snake.
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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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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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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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How do you defeat terrorism? Don’t be terrorized.
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I admit it: above all things, I fear absurdity.
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What’s real and what’s true aren’t necessarily the same.
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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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When a reader falls in love with a book, it leaves its essence inside him, like radioactive fallout in an arable field, and after that there are certain crops that will no longer grow in him, while other, stranger, more fantastic growths may occasionally be produced.
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The moment you declare a set of ideas to be immune from criticism, satire, derision, or contempt, freedom of thought becomes impossible.
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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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We were language’s magpies by nature, stealing whatever sounded bright and shiny.
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Liberate yourself, because no one else is going to liberate you.
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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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If somebody’s trying to shut you up, sing louder, and if possible, better.
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The world, somebody wrote, is the place we prove real by dying in it.
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So India’s problem turns out to be the world’s problem. What happened in India has happened in God’s name. The problem’s name is God.
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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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