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Friendships are the family we make – not the one we inherit. I’ve always been someone to whom friendship, elective affinities, is as important as family.

Salman Rushdie

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.
SALMAN RUSHDIE

Exploration Heart Human Imagination Literature Place Society Spirit Truth
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.
SALMAN RUSHDIE

Fake Mistake Name Poet Sleep Stop Work World
You can’t have modern states based on ideas which have been out of date for a thousand years.
SALMAN RUSHDIE

Ideas Modern Old Time Yourself
Only the foolish, blinded by language’s conventions, think of fire as red or gold. Fire is blue at it’s melancholy rim, green in it’s envious heart. It may burn white, or even, in it’s greatest rages, black.
SALMAN RUSHDIE

Black Blind Fire Fools Gold Language Thinking
For every snake, there is a ladder; for every ladder, a snake.
SALMAN RUSHDIE

Advice Game Ladder Life Snake
Masks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull.
SALMAN RUSHDIE

Blood Head Hide Mask
My horizon’s have shrunk and I have only endings to write.
SALMAN RUSHDIE

End Limitation Myself Restriction Write
Friendships are the family we make – not the one we inherit. I’ve always been someone to whom friendship, elective affinities, is as important as family.
SALMAN RUSHDIE

Family Friendship Important Inheritance Myself
How do you defeat terrorism? Don’t be terrorized.
SALMAN RUSHDIE

Deep Defeat Fear Terrorism Yourself
I think if we wish to live in any kind of a moral universe, we must hold the perpetrators of violence responsible for the violence they perpetrate. It’s very simple. The criminal is responsible for the crime.
SALMAN RUSHDIE

Crime Kind Moral Responsible Simplicity Thinking Universe Violence
What’s real and what’s true aren’t necessarily the same.
SALMAN RUSHDIE

Home Necessary Reality True
Until you know who you are you can’t write.
SALMAN RUSHDIE

Writing Yourself
Free speech is not just free speech for people you admire. It’s also for people who you think of as reprehensible.
SALMAN RUSHDIE

Freedom People Talk Thinking Voice
The moment you declare a set of ideas to be immune from criticism, satire, derision, or contempt, freedom of thought becomes impossible.
SALMAN RUSHDIE

Criticism Freedom Ideas Impossible Moments Thinking
Perhaps the story you finish is never the one you begin.
SALMAN RUSHDIE

Beginning End Story Yourself
The lessons one learns at school are not always the ones the school thinks it’s teaching.
SALMAN RUSHDIE

Education Learning Lesson Oneself Teaching Thinking

Friendships are the family we make – not the one we inherit. I’ve always been someone to whom friendship, elective affinities, is as important as family.

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Friendships are the family we make – not the one we inherit. I’ve always been someone to whom friendship, elective affinities, is as important as family.

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Popular Authors

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