Literature is the one place in any society where, within the secrecy of our own heads, we can hear voices talking about everything in every possible way.
SALMAN RUSHDIELiterature is the one place in any society where, within the secrecy of our own heads, we can hear voices talking about everything in every possible way.
More Salman Rushdie Quotes
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We are the storytelling animal.
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If you’re offended, it’s your problem.
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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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What kind of Christmas present would Jesus ask Santa for?
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I didn’t become a writer to write about me.
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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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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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What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.
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Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination and of the heart.
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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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We cannot allow religious hooligans to place limiting points on thought.
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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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We were language’s magpies by nature, stealing whatever sounded bright and shiny.
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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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Liberate yourself, because no one else is going to liberate you.
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Reality is a question of perspective.
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How do you defeat terrorism? Don’t be terrorized.
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Once you put a thought into the world, it can be disagreed with, but it can’t be unthought.
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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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My horizon’s have shrunk and I have only endings to write.
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The world, somebody wrote, is the place we prove real by dying in it.
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Masks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull.
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If somebody’s trying to shut you up, sing louder, and if possible, better.
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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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I have always thought that these two ways of talking, one is the fantastic, the fable, the fairy tale, and the other being history, the scholarly study of what happened, I think they’re both amazing ways to understand human nature.
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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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