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 RUSHDIERespect for religion’ has become a code phrase meaning ‘fear of religion.’ Religions, like all other ideas, deserve criticism, satire, and, yes, our fearless disrespect.
More Salman Rushdie Quotes
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What kind of Christmas present would Jesus ask Santa for?
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I stand with Charlie Hebdo, as we all must, to defend the art of satire.
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Where there is no belief, there is no blasphemy.
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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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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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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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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 are the storytelling animal.
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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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I write books I’d enjoy reading, I’m the reader standing behind my shoulder.
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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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What’s real and what’s true aren’t necessarily the same.
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If you take a look at history, you will find that the understanding of what is good and evil has always existed before the individual religions. The religions were only invented by people afterwards, in order to express this idea.
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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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For every snake, there is a ladder; for every ladder, a snake.
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The world, somebody wrote, is the place we prove real by dying in it.
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It is very, very easy not to be offended by a book. You just have to shut it.
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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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We cannot allow religious hooligans to place limiting points on thought.
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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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I didn’t become a writer to write about me.
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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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Between the adored and the adorer falls the shadow.
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Religion is responsible for a lot of the problems in the history of the world and it’s not something that I practice or recommend, but to each his own.
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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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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 RUSHDIE