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The frustrating part of being tagged 'controversial' is people go looking for trouble where there isn't any to look for.


Salman Rushdie

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MARGARET PETERSON HADDIX Let's head out to the ruins." - Dan Cahill
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RICK RIORDAN Salman Rushdie, indeed any writer who abuses the prophet or indeed any prophet under Islamic law, th...
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KEVIN HASSETT I've got a few ideas," (Amy) admitted. "But I don't know where we're going in the long term. I mean ...
RICK RIORDAN That's all there is; there isn't any more.
ETHEL BARRYMORE Alas, I think I am becoming a god.
TITUS Some men by ancestry are only the shadow of a mighty name.
LUCAN I have a wife, I have sons: all of them hostages given to fate.
LUCAN Being mean just for being mean's sake isn't funny.
KAITLIN OLSON If an individual wants to be a leader and isn't controversial, that means he never stood for any...
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FREDDIE WONG If the part isn't always there on the page, I've had good relationships with writers where t...
FELICITY JONES I'm not a pacifist. I feel that there are situations where fighting is inescapable, but we don&#...
BRUCE COCKBURN Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end.
SENECA Drunkenness is nothing but voluntary madness.
SENECA We never reflect how pleasant it is to ask for nothing.
SENECA Just as I shall select my ship when I am about to go on a voyage, or my house when I propose to take...
SENECA Begin at once to live, and count each separate day as a separate life.
SENECA Luck is where opportunity meets preparation.
SENECA Friendship always benefits; love sometimes injures.
SENECA I never had any trouble being myself. Myself was a problem for a lot of people, but I didn't hav...
TITUSS BURGESS Being ready isn't enough; you have to be prepared for a promotion or any other significant chang...
PAT RILEY Being nervous isn't always the worst thing for me.
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BROOKE ELLIOTT I used to watch 'Grey's Anatomy' pretty religiously.
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MICHAEL ROBOTHAM When I hear of an 'equity' in a case like this, I am reminded of a blind man in a dark room ...
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BRENDA STRONG Why isn't there a special name for the tops of your feet?
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JESSE EISENBERG I like Celtic folk music, Native American music, and any kind of early music. There isn't a lot ...
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CARLTON CUSE

More Salman Rushdie

We are the storytelling animal.
SALMAN RUSHDIE It is very, very easy not to be offended by a book. You just have to shut it.
SALMAN RUSHDIE What happened in Pakistan was that people were told: You're all Muslim, so now you're a coun...
SALMAN RUSHDIE If you're offended, it's your problem.
SALMAN RUSHDIE War used to be something you could stand on the nearby hill and watch. Now we have total war; everyb...
SALMAN RUSHDIE There is nothing intrinsic linking any religion with any act of violence. The crusades don't pro...
SALMAN RUSHDIE The First Amendment defends all forms of speech including hate speech, which is why groups like Ku K...
SALMAN RUSHDIE One of the problems with defending free speech is you often have to defend people that you find to b...
SALMAN RUSHDIE When you write, you write out of your best self. Everything else drops away.
SALMAN RUSHDIE What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.
SALMAN RUSHDIE Censorship is the thing that stops you doing what you want to do, and what writers want to talk abou...
SALMAN RUSHDIE In an ideal world, you could reunite the Pakistan-occupied part of Kashmir with the Indian-occupied ...
SALMAN RUSHDIE A purpose of our lives is to broaden what we can understand and say and therefore be.
SALMAN RUSHDIE So India’s problem turns out to be the world’s problem. What happened in India has happened in G...
SALMAN RUSHDIE ‎No people whose word for 'yesterday' is the same as their word for 'tomorrow' can be said to have...
SALMAN RUSHDIE The novel does not seek to establish a privileged language but it insists upon the freedom to portra...
SALMAN RUSHDIE The acceptance that all that is solid has melted into the air, that reality and morality are not giv...
SALMAN RUSHDIE Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can't forgive.
SALMAN RUSHDIE Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; t...
SALMAN RUSHDIE I make no complaint. I am a writer. I do not accept my condition; I will strive to change it; but I ...
SALMAN RUSHDIE I have been a film buff all my life and believe that the finest cinema is fully the equal of the bes...
SALMAN RUSHDIE The suicide bomber's imagination leads him to believe in a brilliant act of heroism, when in fac...
SALMAN RUSHDIE Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plaus...
SALMAN RUSHDIE In writing 'The Satanic Verses,' I think I was writing for the first time from the whole of ...
SALMAN RUSHDIE You can take the boy out of Bombay; you can't take Bombay out of the boy, you know.
SALMAN RUSHDIE I do think of Bombay as my hometown. Those are the streets I walked when I was learning to walk. And...
SALMAN RUSHDIE I have always thought, the secret purpose of the book tour is to make the writer hate the book he...
SALMAN RUSHDIE Names, once they are in common use, quickly become mere sounds, their etymology being buried, like s...
SALMAN RUSHDIE One of the extraordinary things about human events is that the unthinkable becomes thinkable.
SALMAN RUSHDIE When thought becomes excessively painful, action is the finest remedy.
SALMAN RUSHDIE A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape t...
SALMAN RUSHDIE The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because ...
SALMAN RUSHDIE I used to say: there is a God-shaped hole in me. For a long time I stressed the absence, the hole. N...
SALMAN RUSHDIE The real risks for any artist are taken in pushing the work to the limits of what is possible, in th...
SALMAN RUSHDIE The writers of the French enlightenment had deliberately used blasphemy as a weapon, refusing to acc...
SALMAN RUSHDIE This paranoid Islam, which blames outsider, 'infidels', for all the ills of Muslim societies...
SALMAN RUSHDIE I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything do...
SALMAN RUSHDIE If you want to tell the untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you've got to fi...
SALMAN RUSHDIE The liveliness of literature lies in its exceptionality, in being the individual, idiosyncratic visi...
SALMAN RUSHDIE The only privilege literature deserves -- and this privilege it requires in order to exist -- is the...
SALMAN RUSHDIE Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human ...
SALMAN RUSHDIE Literature is the one place in any society where, within the secrecy of our own heads, we can hear v...
SALMAN RUSHDIE We must conclude that it is not only a particular political ideology that has failed, but the idea t...
SALMAN RUSHDIE In this world without quiet corners, there can be no easy escapes from history, from hullabaloo, fro...
SALMAN RUSHDIE Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.
SALMAN RUSHDIE For the barbarians were not only at our gates but within our skins. We were our own wooden horses, e...
SALMAN RUSHDIE Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts.
SALMAN RUSHDIE Such is the miraculous nature of the future of exiles: what is first uttered in the impotence of an ...
SALMAN RUSHDIE Your blasphemy, Salman, can't be forgiven. To set your words against the Words of God.
SALMAN RUSHDIE Where there is no belief, there is no blasphemy.
SALMAN RUSHDIE Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plaus...
SALMAN RUSHDIE Vertigo is the conflict between the fear of falling and the desire to fall.
SALMAN RUSHDIE Realism can break a writer's heart.
SALMAN RUSHDIE Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, the power to retell it, rethi...
SALMAN RUSHDIE ...because it is the privilige and the curse of midnight's children to be both masters and victims o...
SALMAN RUSHDIE Thomas Pynchon looks exactly like Thomas Pynchon should look. He is tall, he wears lumberjack shirts...
SALMAN RUSHDIE I hate admitting that my enemies have a point.
SALMAN RUSHDIE Most American writers don't get asked their opinion on current affairs, whereas in Europe and En...
SALMAN RUSHDIE Stories in families are colossally important. Every family has stories: some funny, some proud, some...
SALMAN RUSHDIE I think, in a written novel, the way in which you play with the readers' emotion or the way in w...
SALMAN RUSHDIE An attack upon our ability to tell stories is not just censorship - it is a crime against our nature...
SALMAN RUSHDIE Pakistan is alarmed by the rising Indian influence in Afghanistan, and fears that an Afghanistan cle...
SALMAN RUSHDIE British society has never been cleansed of the filth of imperialism.
SALMAN RUSHDIE Straight answers were beyond the powers of Rashid Khalifa, who would never take a short cut if there...
SALMAN RUSHDIE Self-censorship is a lie to yourself; if you are going to be trying to seriously create art, to crea...
SALMAN RUSHDIE What's real and what's true aren't necessarily the same.
SALMAN RUSHDIE Most of what matters in our lives takes place in our absence.
SALMAN RUSHDIE faith without doubt is addiction
SALMAN RUSHDIE Our lives disconnect and reconnect, we move on, and later we may again touch one another, again boun...
SALMAN RUSHDIE The only people who see the whole picture,' he murmured, 'are the ones who step out of the frame.
SALMAN RUSHDIE We all owe death a life.
SALMAN RUSHDIE Free societies...are societies in motion, and with motion comes tension, dissent, friction. Free peo...
SALMAN RUSHDIE To understand just one life you have to swallow the world ... do you wonder, then, that I was a heav...
SALMAN RUSHDIE Nobody has the right to not be offended. That right doesn't exist in any declaration I have ever rea...
SALMAN RUSHDIE A photograph is a moral decision taken in one eighth of a second.
SALMAN RUSHDIE A poet's work . . . to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape...
SALMAN RUSHDIE What kind of idea are you? Are you the kind that compromises, does deals, accomodates itself to soci...
SALMAN RUSHDIE When a reader falls in love with a book, it leaves its essence inside him, like radioactive fallout ...
SALMAN RUSHDIE Go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets. Take a deep breath before you b...
SALMAN RUSHDIE Now I know what a ghost is. Unfinished business, that's what.
SALMAN RUSHDIE Memory's truth, because memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates...
SALMAN RUSHDIE Whenever someone who knows you disappears, you lose one version of yourself. Yourself as you were se...
SALMAN RUSHDIE Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true...
SALMAN RUSHDIE My horizon's have shrunk and I have only endings to write.
SALMAN RUSHDIE Make as much racket as you like people. Noise is life and an excess of noise is a sign that life is ...
SALMAN RUSHDIE In television, the 60-minute series, 'The Wire' and 'Mad Men' and so on, the writer ...
SALMAN RUSHDIE If the creative artist worries if he will still be free tomorrow, then he will not be free today.
SALMAN RUSHDIE Hyperrealism can create an atmosphere of surrealism because nobody sees the world in such detail.
SALMAN RUSHDIE The difference between memoir and autobiography, as far as I see it, is that a memoir is there prima...
SALMAN RUSHDIE In any authoritarian society, the possessor of power dictates, and if you try and step outside, he w...
SALMAN RUSHDIE One of the strange things about violent and authoritarian regimes is they don't like the glare o...
SALMAN RUSHDIE The response of anybody interested in liberty is that we all have a say and the ability to have an a...
SALMAN RUSHDIE Many writers who have had to deal with the subject of atrocity can't face it head-on.
SALMAN RUSHDIE Throughout human history, the apostles of purity, those who have claimed to possess a total explanat...
SALMAN RUSHDIE If you live in free countries, you don't have to spend all your life arguing about freedom becau...
SALMAN RUSHDIE What I worry about and don't like is the way in which the ideology of multiculturalism has decli...
SALMAN RUSHDIE Sometimes great, banned works defy the censor's description and impose themselves on the world -...
SALMAN RUSHDIE The Koran was revealed at a time of great change in the Arab world, the seventh-century shift from a...
SALMAN RUSHDIE One of the reasons my name is Rushdie is that my father was an admirer of Ibn Rush'd, the 12th c...
SALMAN RUSHDIE At the height of the British Empire very few English novels were written that dealt with British pow...
SALMAN RUSHDIE Original thought, original artistic expression is by its very nature questioning, irreverent, iconoc...
SALMAN RUSHDIE There are two things in Indian history - one is the incredible optimism and potential of the place, ...
SALMAN RUSHDIE The only thing worse than a bad review from the Ayatollah Khomeini would be a good review from the A...
SALMAN RUSHDIE I've been fascinated by Machiavelli since I was very young. I've always felt that he had a b...
SALMAN RUSHDIE I'm not a prophet, but I always thought it was natural for dictatorships to fall. I remember in ...
SALMAN RUSHDIE But there's one thing we must all be clear about: terrorism is not the pursuit of legitimate goa...
SALMAN RUSHDIE I'm a big-city boy. What I like is big cities. It's not just what I like. It's what I wr...
SALMAN RUSHDIE Two things form the bedrock of any open society - freedom of expression and rule of law. If you don&...
SALMAN RUSHDIE Mahound comes to me for revelation, asking me to choose between monotheist and henotheist alternativ...
SALMAN RUSHDIE Don't let the zealots make Muslim a terrifying word."

[1,000 Days 'Trapped Inside a Me...
SALMAN RUSHDIE Fundamentalism isn't about religion, it's about power.
SALMAN RUSHDIE From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable.
SALMAN RUSHDIE When...did it become irrational to dislike religion, any religion, even to dislike it vehemently? Wh...
SALMAN RUSHDIE Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.
SALMAN RUSHDIE All my adult life, if I didn't have several hours a day to sit in a room by myself, I would get ...
SALMAN RUSHDIE Out-of-step intellectuals like Noam Chomsky and the deceased Edward Said have often been dismissed a...
SALMAN RUSHDIE American literature has always been immigrant.
SALMAN RUSHDIE I've met the Dalai Lama briefly, but I would probably say my grandfather was the wisest person I...
SALMAN RUSHDIE Our lives are not what we deserve; they are, let us agree, in many ways deficient.
SALMAN RUSHDIE I have had many more close women friends than men, and I've always assumed that comes from the f...
SALMAN RUSHDIE Before I came to England, my favorite authors were P. G. Wodehouse and Agatha Christie. I used to de...
SALMAN RUSHDIE This is going to make me sound ancient, but I remember Juhu Beach when there weren't any buildin...
SALMAN RUSHDIE If Woody Allen were a Muslim, he'd be dead by now.
SALMAN RUSHDIE A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in ret...
SALMAN RUSHDIE Our lives teach us who we are.
SALMAN RUSHDIE Not even the visionary or mystical experience ever lasts very long. It is for art to capture that ex...
SALMAN RUSHDIE How do you defeat terrorism? Don’t be terrorized.
SALMAN RUSHDIE A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape...
SALMAN RUSHDIE What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second,...
SALMAN RUSHDIE If you look at Indian movies, every time they wanted an exotic locale, they would have a dance numbe...
SALMAN RUSHDIE I think that we live in a very timid age, and a part of our timidity arises from our unwillingness t...
SALMAN RUSHDIE I write books I'd enjoy reading, I'm the reader standing behind my shoulder.
SALMAN RUSHDIE It seems that the right of freedom of speech that was enshrined in numerous constitutions is now und...
SALMAN RUSHDIE Islam is unusual in that it's the only one of the great world religions which was born inside re...
SALMAN RUSHDIE It's Kennedy's war, Vietnam. Lyndon Johnson got all the flak, but it's Kennedy's war...
SALMAN RUSHDIE And now, as if to finish things off, the Himalayan winter is setting in, and the greatest calamity o...
SALMAN RUSHDIE As a writer, one of the things we all learned from the movies was a kind of compression that didn...
SALMAN RUSHDIE What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist
SALMAN RUSHDIE Have you noticed the physical resemblance between Imran Khan and Gaddafi? If you were making a movie...
SALMAN RUSHDIE Certainly, poverty and economic decline have a lot to do with the so-called rage of Islam. You'v...
SALMAN RUSHDIE A poet's work is to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shap...
SALMAN RUSHDIE A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, sha...
SALMAN RUSHDIE Free societies are societies in motion, and with motion comes friction.
SALMAN RUSHDIE If you're on a freeway and want to know if you're being followed, what you do is enormously ...
SALMAN RUSHDIE In the real world, immeasurable hurt is caused by terrorists based in Pakistan who attack countries ...
SALMAN RUSHDIE When thought becomes excessively painful, action is the finest remedy
SALMAN RUSHDIE The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because ...
SALMAN RUSHDIE What I've always tried to find in my books are points at which the private lives of the characte...
SALMAN RUSHDIE wants the dreadful, wants to stare down the human race's worst-case scenarios.
SALMAN RUSHDIE Rohinton Mistry's celebrated novel 'Such a Long Journey' was pulled off the syllabus of ...
SALMAN RUSHDIE Meanwhile, it seems, the world is suffering from compassion fatigue,
SALMAN RUSHDIE I've never seen anywhere in the world as beautiful as Kashmir. It has something to do with the f...
SALMAN RUSHDIE The enemy for the fanatic is pleasure, which makes it extremely important to continue to indulge in ...
SALMAN RUSHDIE Matthew Wiener on 'Mad Men' writes the entire series before they start shooting, and if you ...
SALMAN RUSHDIE Someone asked me if I was afraid to write my memoirs. I told him: 'We have to stop drawing up ac...
SALMAN RUSHDIE I only met Margaret Thatcher twice. The thing that I thought about meeting her was how extraordinari...
SALMAN RUSHDIE A change in direction was required. The story you finished was perhaps never the one you began. Yes!...
SALMAN RUSHDIE In today's U.S., it's possible for almost anyone - women, gays, African-Americans, Jews - to...
SALMAN RUSHDIE When 'Midnight's Children' came out, people in the West tended to respond to the fantasy...
SALMAN RUSHDIE The accidents of my life have given me the ability to make stories in which different parts of the w...
SALMAN RUSHDIE Sometimes writing a novel is not unlike having a baby. You'd have to ask a female novelist to co...
SALMAN RUSHDIE I have a deep feeling for Kashmir, and I just had to write this book, ... [But] it's very hard to wr...
SALMAN RUSHDIE One of the strange things that happens when you publish a book is that you begin ... to see what res...
SALMAN RUSHDIE The real risks for any artist are taken in pushing the work to the limits of what is possible, in th...
SALMAN RUSHDIE Most of what matters in your life takes place in your absence.
SALMAN RUSHDIE Friendships are the family we make - not the one we inherit. I've always been someone to whom fr...
SALMAN RUSHDIE I didn't want to become some embittered old hack getting his revenge for the rest of my life. An...
SALMAN RUSHDIE antediluvian, who think of homosexuality as ungodly, who have little time for real freedom of expres...
SALMAN RUSHDIE Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plaus...
SALMAN RUSHDIE Religion, a mediaeval form of unreason, when combined with modern weaponry becomes a real threat to ...
SALMAN RUSHDIE At sixteen, you still think you can escape from your father. You aren't listening to his voice speak...
SALMAN RUSHDIE There is a widespread difficulty in the Muslim world, which has to do with how the people are taught...
SALMAN RUSHDIE I remember when I was young, many cities in the Muslim world were cosmopolitan cities with a lot of ...
SALMAN RUSHDIE There'll be one track that I like and a lot of it that is just wallpaper and sounds the same.
SALMAN RUSHDIE Our lives, our stories, flowed into one another's, were no longer our own, individual, discrete.
SALMAN RUSHDIE If I were asked for a one-sentence sound
bite on religion, I would say I was against it.
SALMAN RUSHDIE I used to write a monthly column for the 'New York Times' syndicate. But I stopped because I...
SALMAN RUSHDIE If you were an atheist, Birbal," the Emperor challenged his first minister, "what would you say to t...
SALMAN RUSHDIE It matters, it always matters, to name rubbish as rubbish … to do otherwise is to legitimize it."<...
SALMAN RUSHDIE One of the things I've learnt is not to depend on there being a woman in your life to make it wo...
SALMAN RUSHDIE The fundamentalist seeks to bring down a great deal more than buildings. Such people are against, to...
SALMAN RUSHDIE Repression is a seamless garment; a society which is authoritarian in its social and sexual codes, w...
SALMAN RUSHDIE When a book leaves its author's desk it changes. Even before anyone has read it, before eyes other t...
SALMAN RUSHDIE Always do something impossible right at the beginning of the show?. Swallow a sword, tie yourself in...
SALMAN RUSHDIE I've tried to live without fear. Fear paralyzes you. I've tried to get on with my life.
SALMAN RUSHDIE I've been gradually reclaiming all kinds of freedoms over these years..,
SALMAN RUSHDIE Obviously, it is a very great honor and I'm very pleased to have it, and it's very nice to be recogn...
SALMAN RUSHDIE I think it's a stupid way to read a book, ... to say that because something happens to one person th...
SALMAN RUSHDIE Life is fury, he'd thought. Fury — sexual, Oedipal, political, magical, brutal — drives us to ou...
SALMAN RUSHDIE If I were asked for a one-sentence sound bite on religion, I would say I was against it
SALMAN RUSHDIE Masks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull.
SALMAN RUSHDIE Nobody ever wanted to go to war, but if a war came your way, it might as well be the right war, abou...
SALMAN RUSHDIE A question I have often asked is, ‘What would an inoffensive political cartoon look like?’ What ...
SALMAN RUSHDIE What one writer can make in the solitude of one room is something no power can easily destroy.
SALMAN RUSHDIE Many of us persons of the tinted persuasion care about human rights and artistic freedom too.
SALMAN RUSHDIE From such defensive, separated worlds some youngsters have indefensibly stepped across a moral line ...
SALMAN RUSHDIE Susan Sontag was a great literary artist,"a fearless and original thinker, ever valiant for truth, a...
SALMAN RUSHDIE However, in the end, the question [remains]: Why him and not the man standing next to him? Why did t...
SALMAN RUSHDIE The Satanic Verses.
SALMAN RUSHDIE Rock and roll music - the music of freedom frightens people and unleashes all manner of conservative...
SALMAN RUSHDIE