No, I don’t think it’s fair to label Islam ‘violent.’ But I will say that to my knowledge, no writer has ever gone into hiding for criticizing the Amish.
SALMAN RUSHDIEI stand with Charlie Hebdo, as we all must, to defend the art of satire.
More Salman Rushdie Quotes
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We are the storytelling animal.
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What kind of Christmas present would Jesus ask Santa for?
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My horizon’s have shrunk and I have only endings to write.
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Reality is a question of perspective.
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Liberate yourself, because no one else is going to liberate you.
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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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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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We all owe death a life.
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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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Masks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull.
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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 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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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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Our lives, our stories, flowed into one another’s, were no longer our own, individual, discrete.
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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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You can’t have modern states based on ideas which have been out of date for a thousand years.
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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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If somebody’s trying to shut you up, sing louder, and if possible, better.
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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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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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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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For every snake, there is a ladder; for every ladder, a snake.
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I didn’t become a writer to write about me.
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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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If you actually want to change your world, there is a better way of doing it than blowing yourself up.
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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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