Salman Rushdie Quotes

» 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.

» What one writer can make in the solitude of one room is something no power can easily destroy.

» What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry.

» It is very, very easy not to be offended by a book. You just have to shut it.

» Our lives teach us who we are.

» I hate admitting that my enemies have a point.

» A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return.

» Most of what matters in your life takes place in your absence.

» Be sure that you go to the author to get at his meaning, not to find yours.

» Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.

» If Woody Allen were a Muslim, he'd be dead by now.

» I do not need the idea of God to explain the world I live in.

» When thought becomes excessively painful, action is the finest remedy.

» Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts.

» Vertigo is the conflict between the fear of falling and the desire to fall.

» What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.

» Our lives are not what we deserve; they are, let us agree, in many ways deficient.

» If I were asked for a one-sentence sound bite on religion, I would say I was against it.

» One of the extraordinary things about human events is that the unthinkable becomes thinkable.

» In this world without quiet corners, there can be no easy escapes from history, from hullabaloo, from terrible, unquiet fuss.

» Rock and roll music - the music of freedom frightens people and unleashes all manner of conservative defense mechanisms.

» Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory.

» Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.

» Doubt, it seems to me, is the central condition of a human being in the twentieth century.

» 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.

» 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.

» I used to say, 'There is a God-shaped hole in me.' For a long time I stressed the absence, the hole. Now I find it is the shape which has become more important.

» 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.

» 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.

» 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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Who Said: "All great change in America begins at the dinner table." Click To See

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Salman Rushdie Quotes

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