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.
SALMAN RUSHDIEWhat one writer can make in the solitude of one room is something no power can easily destroy.
More Salman Rushdie Quotes
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I write books I’d enjoy reading, I’m the reader standing behind my shoulder.
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For every snake, there is a ladder; for every ladder, a snake.
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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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Too many people spouting too many words, and in the end those words will turn to bullets and stones.
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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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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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What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.
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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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Perhaps the story you finish is never the one you begin.
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An attack upon our ability to tell stories is not just censorship – it is a crime against our nature as human beings.
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Our lives, our stories, flowed into one another’s, were no longer our own, individual, discrete.
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I didn’t become a writer to write about me.
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We were language’s magpies by nature, stealing whatever sounded bright and shiny.
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Where there is no belief, there is no blasphemy.
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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 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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It matters, it always matters, to name rubbish as rubbish; that to do otherwise is to legitimize it.
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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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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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The only people who see the whole picture,’ he murmured, ‘are the ones who step out of the frame.
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Science fiction is always a vehicle for ideas. It’s the form which allows either movies or books to be an exploration of how we should live.
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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.
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The world, somebody wrote, is the place we prove real by dying in it.
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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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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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Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true.
SALMAN RUSHDIE