In the cookie of life, friends are the chocolate chips.
SALMAN RUSHDIEFree speech is not just free speech for people you admire. It’s also for people who you think of as reprehensible.
More Salman Rushdie Quotes
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If you actually want to change your world, there is a better way of doing it than blowing yourself up.
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Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true.
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I stand with Charlie Hebdo, as we all must, to defend the art of satire.
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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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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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Until you know who you are you can’t write.
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I’ve been worrying about God a little bit lately. It seems like he’s been in a bad mood. And I think it has to do with the quality of lovers he’s been getting.
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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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I have never really thought of myself as a writer about religion. And I think one of the things that happened to me as a result of all that is that I think it did for some people, many people, obscure the kind of writer that I actually am.
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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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The world, somebody wrote, is the place we prove real by dying in it.
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What kind of Christmas present would Jesus ask Santa for?
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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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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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Where there is no belief, there is no blasphemy.
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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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One of the strange things about violent and authoritarian regimes is they don’t like the glare of negative publicity.
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Perhaps the story you finish is never the one you begin.
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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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How do you defeat terrorism? Don’t be terrorized.
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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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What I do think is evident is that those countries in the world where Islamic extremism has recovered the most power, those are also the countries which are most disliked.
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Our lives, our stories, flowed into one another’s, were no longer our own, individual, discrete.
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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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I admit it: above all things, I fear absurdity.
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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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