The collection / 191 fragments

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Passages, proverbs, and questions carried across the ages.

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01Undated

‎No people whose word for 'yesterday' is the same as their word for 'tomorrow' can be said to have a firm grip on the time.

Salman Rushdie / quote

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02Undated

He did not wish to be divine. If there had never been a God, the emperor thought, it might have been easier to work out what goodness was. This business of worship, of the abnegation of self in the face of the Almighty, was a distraction, a false trail. Wherever goodness lay, it did not lie in ritual, unthinking obeisance before a deity but rather, perhaps, in the slow, clumsy, error-strewn working out of an individual or collective path.

Salman Rushdie / quote

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03Undated

Fury...sexual, Oedipal, political, magical, brutal....drives us to our finest heights and coarsest depths

Salman Rushdie / quote

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04Undated

From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable.

Salman Rushdie / quote

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05Undated

So India’s problem turns out to be the world’s problem. What happened in India has happened in God’s name.The problem’s name is God.

Salman Rushdie / quote

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06Undated

All true believers have good reasons for disbelieving in every god except their own,' said Birbal, 'and so it is they who, between them, give me all the reasons for believing in none.

Salman Rushdie / quote

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07Undated

He knew that his father had finally run hard enough and long enough to wear down the frontiers between the worlds, he had run clear out of his skin and into the arms of his wife, to whom he had proved, once and for all, the superiority of his love. Some migrants are happy to depart.

Salman Rushdie / quote

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08Undated

A poet's work . . . to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep.

Salman Rushdie / quote

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09Undated

Go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets. Take a deep breath before you begin talking. Aim for the stars. Keep grinning. Be bloody-minded. Argue with the world. And never forget that writing is as close as we get to keeping a hold on the thousand and one things--childhood, certainties, cities, doubts, dreams, instants, phrases, parents, loves--that go on slipping , like sand, through our fingers.

Salman Rushdie / quote

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10Undated

Realism can break a writer's heart.

Salman Rushdie / quote

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11Undated

Obviously, a rigid, blinkered, absolutist world view is the easiest to keep hold of, whereas the fluid, uncertain, metamorphic picture I've always carried about is rather more vulnerable. Yet I must cling with all my might to … my own soul; must hold on to its mischievous, iconoclastic, out-of-step clown-instincts, no matter how great the storm. And if that plunges me into contradiction and paradox, so be it; I've lived in that messy ocean all my life. I've fished in it for my art. This turbulent sea was the sea outside my bedroom window in Bombay. It is the sea by which I was born, and which I carry within me wherever I go.

Salman Rushdie / quote

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12Undated

Until you know who you are you can’t write.

Salman Rushdie / quote

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13Undated

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

Salman Rushdie / quote

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14Undated

When...did it become irrational to dislike religion, any religion, even to dislike it vehemently? When did reason get redescribed as unreason? When were the fairy stories of the superstitious placed above criticism, beyond satire? A religion was not a race. It was an idea, and ideas stood (or fell) because they were strong enough (or too weak) to withstand criticism, not because they were shielded from it. Strong ideas welcomed dissent.

Salman Rushdie / quote

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15Undated

Nobody ever wanted to go to war, but if a war came your way, it might as well be the right war, about the most important things in the world, and you might as well, if you were going to fight it, be called "Rushdie," and stand where your father had placed you, in the tradition of the grand Aristotelian, Averroës, Abul Walid Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Rushd.

Salman Rushdie / quote

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16Undated

Mahound comes to me for revelation, asking me to choose between monotheist and henotheist alternatives, and I'm just some idiot actor having a bhaenchud nightmare, what the fuck do I know, yaar, what to tell you, help. Help.

Salman Rushdie / quote

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17Undated

A book is a product of a pact with the Devil that inverts the Faustian contract, he'd told Allie. Dr Faustus sacrificed eternity in return for two dozen years of power; the writer agrees to the ruination of his life, and gains (but only if he's lucky) maybe not eternity, but posterity, at least. Either way (this was Jumpy's point) it's the Devil who wins.

Salman Rushdie / quote

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18Undated

for to the arguments of great thinkers there is no end, the idea of argument itself being a tool to improve the mind, the sharpest of all tools, born of the love of knowledge, which is to say, philosophy.

Salman Rushdie / quote

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19Undated

Tai tapped his left nostril. 'You know what this is, Nakkoo? It's the place where the outside world meets the world inside you.

Salman Rushdie / quote

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20Undated

There are those of us who learn to live completely in the moment. For such people the Past vanishes and the future loses meaning. There is only the Present, which means that two of the three Aalim are surplus to requirements. And then there are those of us who are trapped in yesterdays, in the memory of a lost love, or a childhood home, or a dreadful crime. And some people live only for a better tomorrow; for them the past ceases to exist

Salman Rushdie / quote

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21Undated

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 prod

Salman Rushdie / quote

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22Undated

Nobody has the right to not be offended. That right doesn't exist in any declaration I have ever read. If you are offended it is your problem, and frankly lots of things offend lots of people.I can walk into a bookshop and point out a number of books that I find very unattractive in what they say. But it doesn't occur to me to burn the bookshop down. If you don't like a book, read another book. If you start reading a book and you decide you don't like it, nobody is telling you to finish it. To read a 600-page novel and then say that it has deeply offended you: well, you have done a lot of work to be offended.

Salman Rushdie / quote

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23Undated

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 / quote

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24Undated

When you write, you write out of your best self. Everything else drops away.

Salman Rushdie / quote

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