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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 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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Such is the miraculous nature of the future of exiles: what is first uttered in the impotence of an overheated apartment becomes the fate of nations.
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Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.
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The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas — uncertainty, progress, change — into crimes.
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If Woody Allen were a Muslim, he'd be dead by now.
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Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.
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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.
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What had been (at the beginning) no bigger than a full stop had expanded into a comma, a word, a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter; now it was bursting into more complex developments, becoming, one might say, a book - perhaps an encylopaedia - even a whole language...
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Our lives disconnect and reconnect, we move on, and later we may again touch one another, again bounce away. This is the felt shape of a human life, neither simply linear nor wholly disjunctive nor endlessly bifurcating, but rather this bouncey-castle sequence of bumpings-into and tumblings-apart.
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The history of life was not the bumbling progress — the very English, middle-class progress — Victorian thought had wanted it to be, but violent, a thing of dramatic, cumulative transformations: in the old formulation, more revolution than evolution.
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There is no magic on earth strong enough to wipe out the legacies of one's parents.
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Don't you know girls have to fool people every day of their lives if they want to get anywhere?
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Once you have been in an earthquake you know, even if you survive without a scratch, that like a stroke in the heart, it remains in the earth's breast, horribly potential, always promising to return, to hit you again, with an even more devastating force.
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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.
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English, no longer an English language, now grows from many roots; and those whom it once colonized are carving out large territories within the language for themselves. The Empire is striking back.
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Not all possibilities are open to us. The world is finite; our hopes spill over its rim.
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Who what am I? My answer: I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. 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", everyone 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 a world.
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I hate admitting that my enemies have a point.
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The act of migration puts into crisis everything about the migrating individual or group, everything about identity and self-hood and culture and belief. So if this is a novel about migration it must be that act of putting in question. It must perform the crisis it describes.
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Ibn Rushd's ideas were silenced in their time. And throughout the Muslim world today, progressive ideas are in retreat. Actually Existing Islam reigns supreme, and just as the recently destroyed "Actually Existing Socialism" of the Soviet terror-state was horrifically unlike the utopia of peace and equality of which democratic socialists have dreamed, so also is Actually Existing Islam a force to which I have never given in, to which I cannot submit.
There is a point beyond which conciliation looks like capitulation. I do not believe I passed that point, but others have thought otherwise.
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From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable.
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Nothing comes from nothing, Thieflet; no story comes from nowhere; new stories are born from old—it is the new combinations that make them new.
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Make as much racket as you like people. Noise is life and an excess of noise is a sign that life is good. There will be time for us all to be quiet when we are safely dead.
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Children are the vessels into which adults pour their poison.
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One either loves, or waits for love, or banishes love for good. That is the full range of possible choices.
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Most of what matters in our lives takes place in our absence.
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The real wars of religion are the wars religions unleash against ordinary citizens within their 'sphere of influence'.
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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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Question: What is the opposite of faith? Not disbelief. Too final, certain, closed. Itself a kind of belief. Doubt.
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Quote of the day
I went to a restaurant that serves 'breakfast any time'. So I ordered French toast during the Renaissance.
Steven Wright
Salman Rushdie
Creative Commons
Born:
June 19, 1947
(age 77)
Bio:
Sir Ahmad Salman Rushdie is a British Indian novelist and essayist. His second novel, Midnight's Children, won the Booker Prize in 1981. Much of his fiction is set on the Indian subcontinent.
Known for:
The Satanic Verses (1988)
Midnight's Children (1981)
Joseph Anton: A Memoir (2012)
Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990)
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