An attack upon our ability to tell stories is not just censorship – it is a crime against our nature as human beings.
SALMAN RUSHDIEWe 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.
More Salman Rushdie Quotes
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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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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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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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I write books I’d enjoy reading, I’m the reader standing behind my shoulder.
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We are the storytelling animal.
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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 didn’t become a writer to write about me.
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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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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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He knew what he knew: that the real world was full of magic, so magical worlds could easily be real.
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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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Liberate yourself, because no one else is going to liberate you.
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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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Until you know who you are you can’t write.
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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?
SALMAN RUSHDIE