But there’s one thing we must all be clear about: terrorism is not the pursuit of legitimate goals by some sort of illegitimate means. Whatever the murderers may be trying to achieve, creating a better world certainly isn’t one of their goals. Instead they are out to murder innocent people.
SALMAN RUSHDIEIt matters, it always matters, to name rubbish as rubbish; that to do otherwise is to legitimize it.
More Salman Rushdie Quotes
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You can find shame in every house, burning in an ashtray, hanging framed upon a wall, covering a bed. But nobody notices it any more.
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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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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.
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Free speech is not just free speech for people you admire. It’s also for people who you think of as reprehensible.
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We are the storytelling animal.
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The world, somebody wrote, is the place we prove real by dying in it.
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The only people who see the whole picture,’ he murmured, ‘are the ones who step out of the frame.
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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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My horizon’s have shrunk and I have only endings to write.
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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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I didn’t become a writer to write about me.
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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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Faith without doubt is addiction.
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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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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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Two things form the bedrock of any open society – freedom of expression and rule of law. If you don’t have those things, you don’t have a free country.
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Until you know who you are you can’t write.
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What one writer can make in the solitude of one room is something no power can easily destroy.
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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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Masks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull.
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Every time you finish a book, you have a terrible feeling that there’s just never going to be another one. But fortunately, so far, the next one has always shown up.
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I admit it: above all things, I fear absurdity.
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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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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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It seems that the right of freedom of speech that was enshrined in numerous constitutions is now under attack by religious institutions.
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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.
SALMAN RUSHDIE