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 RUSHDIEIf you actually want to change your world, there is a better way of doing it than blowing yourself up.
More Salman Rushdie Quotes
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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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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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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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We are the storytelling animal.
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Faith without doubt is addiction.
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So India’s problem turns out to be the world’s problem. What happened in India has happened in God’s name. The problem’s name is God.
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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.
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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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For every snake, there is a ladder; for every ladder, a snake.
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Ignorantly is how we all fall in love; for it is a kind of fall. Closing our eyes, we leap from that cliff in hope of a soft landing. Nor is it always soft; but still, without that leap nobody comes to life.
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People can do bad things with free speech as well as good. You have to defend the Ku Klux Klan as well as Martin Luther King. It’s like that. If you’re going to defend the principle, then you have to defend people who use the principle badly.
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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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You can’t have modern states based on ideas which have been out of date for a thousand years.
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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.
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We all owe death a life.
SALMAN RUSHDIE