It is very, very easy not to be offended by a book. You just have to shut it.
SALMAN RUSHDIESelf-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.
More Salman Rushdie Quotes
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What’s real and what’s true aren’t necessarily the same.
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How do you defeat terrorism? Don’t be terrorized.
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Of course, there is nothing intrinsic linking any religion with any act of violence. The crusades don’t prove that Christianity was violent. The Inquisition doesn’t prove that Christianity tortures people. But that Christianity did torture people.
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From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable.
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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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A 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.
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What kind of Christmas present would Jesus ask Santa for?
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Perhaps the story you finish is never the one you begin.
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You can’t have modern states based on ideas which have been out of date for a thousand years.
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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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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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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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Something was badly amiss with the spiritual life of the planet, Too many demons inside people claiming to believe in God.
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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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I admit it: above all things, I fear absurdity.
SALMAN RUSHDIE