Perhaps the story you finish is never the one you begin.
SALMAN RUSHDIEA 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.
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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Liberate yourself, because no one else is going to liberate you.
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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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We are the storytelling animal.
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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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What’s real and what’s true aren’t necessarily the same.
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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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Religion 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.
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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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People can do bad things with free speech as well as good. You have to defend the Ku Klux Klan as well as Martin Luther King. It’s like that. If you’re going to defend the principle, then you have to defend people who use the principle badly.
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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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The world, somebody wrote, is the place we prove real by dying in it.
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Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.
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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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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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From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable.
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Until you know who you are you can’t write.
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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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Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true.
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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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I didn’t become a writer to write about me.
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If somebody’s trying to shut you up, sing louder, and if possible, better.
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Religion, a mediaeval form of unreason, when combined with modern weaponry becomes a real threat to our freedoms. This religious totalitarianism has caused a deadly mutation in the heart of Islam and we see the tragic consequences in Paris today.
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Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, power to retell it, to rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change, truly are powerless, because they cannot think new thoughts.
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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 admit it: above all things, I fear absurdity.
SALMAN RUSHDIE