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 RUSHDIEIgnorantly 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.
More Salman Rushdie Quotes
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He knew what he knew: that the real world was full of magic, so magical worlds could easily be real.
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If somebody’s trying to shut you up, sing louder, and if possible, better.
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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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Masks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull.
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My horizon’s have shrunk and I have only endings to write.
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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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We were language’s magpies by nature, stealing whatever sounded bright and shiny.
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We are the storytelling animal.
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Our lives, our stories, flowed into one another’s, were no longer our own, individual, discrete.
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We have come to think of taking offence as a fundamental right. We value very little more highly than our rage, which gives us, in our opinion, the moral high ground. From there we can shoot down at our enemies and inflict heavy fatalities.
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I write books I’d enjoy reading, I’m the reader standing behind my shoulder.
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You can’t have modern states based on ideas which have been out of date for a thousand years.
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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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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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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 RUSHDIE