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.
SALMAN RUSHDIEIgnorantly 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.
More Salman Rushdie Quotes
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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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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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One of the things a writer is for is to say the unsayable, speak the unspeakable and ask difficult questions.
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In the cookie of life, friends are the chocolate chips.
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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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Masks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull.
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It matters, it always matters, to name rubbish as rubbish; that to do otherwise is to legitimize it.
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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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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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Our lives, our stories, flowed into one another’s, were no longer our own, individual, discrete.
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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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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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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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He knew what he knew: that the real world was full of magic, so magical worlds could easily be real.
SALMAN RUSHDIE