The only people who see the whole picture,’ he murmured, ‘are the ones who step out of the frame.
SALMAN RUSHDIEThe moment you declare a set of ideas to be immune from criticism, satire, derision, or contempt, freedom of thought becomes impossible.
More Salman Rushdie Quotes
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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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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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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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Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true.
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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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Even when things are at their worst, there’s a little voice in your head saying, ‘Good story!’
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We were language’s magpies by nature, stealing whatever sounded bright and shiny.
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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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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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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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Free speech is not just free speech for people you admire. It’s also for people who you think of as reprehensible.
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From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable.
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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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Too many people spouting too many words, and in the end those words will turn to bullets and stones.
SALMAN RUSHDIE