What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.
SALMAN RUSHDIEHe knew what he knew: that the real world was full of magic, so magical worlds could easily be real.
More Salman Rushdie Quotes
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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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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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In the cookie of life, friends are the chocolate chips.
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I’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.
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From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable.
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Even when things are at their worst, there’s a little voice in your head saying, ‘Good story!’
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Faith without doubt is addiction.
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Our lives, our stories, flowed into one another’s, were no longer our own, individual, discrete.
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Between the adored and the adorer falls the shadow.
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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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Reality is a question of perspective.
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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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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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What one writer can make in the solitude of one room is something no power can easily destroy.
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We were language’s magpies by nature, stealing whatever sounded bright and shiny.
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Where there is no belief, there is no blasphemy.
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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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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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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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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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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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What’s real and what’s true aren’t necessarily the same.
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I write books I’d enjoy reading, I’m the reader standing behind my shoulder.
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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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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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The moment you declare a set of ideas to be immune from criticism, satire, derision, or contempt, freedom of thought becomes impossible.
SALMAN RUSHDIE