Best Quotes by Salman Rushdie (Top 10)
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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
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What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.
Salman Rushdie
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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
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How do you defeat terrorism? Don't be terrorized.
Salman Rushdie
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Most of what matters in your life takes place in your absence.
Salman Rushdie
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Perhaps the story you finish is never the one you begin.
Salman Rushdie
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Who what am I? My answer: I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I've gone which would not have happened if I had not come. Nor am I particularly exceptional in this matter; each "I', every one of the now-six-hundred-million-plus of us, contains a similar multitude. I repeat for the last time: to understand me, you'll have to swallow the world.
Salman Rushdie
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Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems - but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible.
Salman Rushdie
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Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.
Salman Rushdie
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Vertigo is the conflict between the fear of falling and the desire to fall.
Salman Rushdie
More Salman Rushdie Quotes
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In spite of all evidence that life is discontinuous, a valley of rifts, and that random chance plays a great part in our fates, we go on believing in the continuity of things, in causation and meaning. But we live on a broken mirror, and fresh cracks appear in its surface every day.
Salman Rushdie
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A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return.
Salman Rushdie
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People don't like being around despair. Our tolerance for the truly hopeless, for those who are irredeemably broken by life is strictly limited. The sob stories we like are the ones that end before we're bored.
Salman Rushdie
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Where there is no belief, there is no blasphemy.
Salman Rushdie
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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.
Salman Rushdie
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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.
Salman Rushdie
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When we stop believing in gods we can start believing in their stories, I retort. There are of course no such things as miracles, but if there were and so tomorrow we woke up to find no more believers on earth, no more devout Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Jews, why then, sure the beauty of the stories would be a thing we could focus on because they wouldn't be dangerous any more, they would become capable of compelling the only belief that leads to truth, that is, the willing, disbelieving of the reader in a well-told tale.
Salman Rushdie
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Our lives teach us who we are.
Salman Rushdie
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The acceptance that all that is solid has melted into the air, that reality and morality are not givens but imperfect human constructs, is the point from which fiction begins.
Salman Rushdie
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If Woody Allen were a Muslim, he'd be dead by now.
Salman Rushdie
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When thought becomes excessively painful, action is the finest remedy.
Salman Rushdie
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One of the things a writer is for is to say the unsayable, speak the unspeakable and ask difficult questions.
Salman Rushdie
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Names, once they are in common use, quickly become mere sounds, their etymology being buried, like so many of the earth's marvels, beneath the dust of habit.
Salman Rushdie
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What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry.
Salman Rushdie
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Throughout human history, the apostles of purity, those who have claimed to possess a total explanation, have wrought havoc among mere mixed-up human beings.
Salman Rushdie
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Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts.
Salman Rushdie