No, I don’t think it’s fair to label Islam ‘violent.’ But I will say that to my knowledge, no writer has ever gone into hiding for criticizing the Amish.
SALMAN RUSHDIEIn the cookie of life, friends are the chocolate chips.
More Salman Rushdie Quotes
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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.
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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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You can’t have modern states based on ideas which have been out of date for a thousand years.
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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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Until you know who you are you can’t write.
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Perhaps the story you finish is never the one you begin.
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Once you put a thought into the world, it can be disagreed with, but it can’t be unthought.
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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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One of the strange things about violent and authoritarian regimes is they don’t like the glare of negative publicity.
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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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Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true.
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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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It matters, it always matters, to name rubbish as rubbish; that to do otherwise is to legitimize it.
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If somebody’s trying to shut you up, sing louder, and if possible, better.
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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.
SALMAN RUSHDIE