Salman Rushdie Quotes and Sayings - Page 1

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“Religion, a mediaeval form of unreason, when combined with modern weaponry becomes a real threat to our freedoms. This religious totalitarianism has caused a deadly mutation in the heart of Islam and we see the tragic consequences in Paris today. I stand with Charlie Hebdo, as we all must, to defend the art of satire, which has always been a force for liberty and against tyranny, dishonesty and stupidity. 'Respect for religion' has become a code phrase meaning 'fear of religion.' Religions, like all other ideas, deserve criticism, satire, and, yes, our fearless disrespect.”
-- Salman Rushdie

#Religious #Art #Real
“Reading is a very different thing than performing. In fact, one of the things I think that doesn't work in books on tape is if the person doing the reading "acts" too much; it becomes irritating to you listening to it.”
-- Salman Rushdie

#Book #Reading #Thinking
“Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true.”
-- Salman Rushdie

#Language #Speak #Ability
“When you're writing for the screen you're really thinking all the time of what you have to do to make sure that they have the information that they need, that the emotional thread is not snapped, that the story moves at the right speed, to keep the audience hopefully sitting on the edge of their seats or else weeping or laughing.”
-- Salman Rushdie

#Moving #Writing #Emotional
“What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.”
-- Salman Rushdie

#Honesty #Integrity #Expression
“When you're writing for the screen, you have to be hyper-conscious every moment of how the audience is going to react. If you write just one scene where the audience is confused or it breaks their concentration in some way, then you've lost them, and you might never get them back.”
-- Salman Rushdie

#Confused #Writing #Might
“I stand with Charlie Hebdo, as we all must, to defend the art of satire”
-- Salman Rushdie

#Art #Satire #Charlie
“What I found interesting writing a screenplay as opposed to writing a novel is not the obvious thing, which is having to pare everything down and find the kind of essence, the skeleton if you like, which can then be fleshed out by performance and cinematography.”
-- Salman Rushdie

#Writing #Essence #Skeletons
“Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.”
-- Salman Rushdie

#Games #Balls #Speech
“I have no problem with people's religious beliefs. I just don't happen to have any.”
-- Salman Rushdie

#Religious #People #Belief
“We were language's magpies by nature, stealing whatever sounded bright and shiny.”
-- Salman Rushdie

#Language #Stealing #Magpies
“It's always been colossally important to me that my books should be well received in India. It's where I come from.”
-- Salman Rushdie

#Book #Important #India
“I stand with Charlie Hebdo, as we all must, to defend the art of satire, which has always been a force for liberty and against tyranny, dishonesty and stupidity.”
-- Salman Rushdie

#Art #Stupidity #Liberty
“I think it's a very important function of art to challenge accepted reality, especially when that reality is created by powerful interest groups.”
-- Salman Rushdie

#Art #Powerful #Reality
“An attack upon our ability to tell stories is not just censorship - it is a crime against our nature as human beings.”
-- Salman Rushdie

#Stories #Censorship #Crime
“One of the strange things about violent and authoritarian regimes is they don't like the glare of negative publicity. If you can make them sufficiently uncomfortable, they frequently respond by doing what you need them to do in the spirit of setting people free or ceasing arrests.”
-- Salman Rushdie

#People #Negative #Needs
“In India, as elsewhere in our darkening world, religion is the poison in the blood. Where religion intervenes, mere innocence is no excuse. Yet we go on skating around this issue, speaking of religion in the fashionable language of 'respect.' What is there to respect in any of this, or in any of the crimes now being committed almost daily around the world in religion's dreaded name?”
-- Salman Rushdie

#Blood #Names #Issues
“What I've always seen in writers and artists is the courage it takes to make an original work of art. I think the real risks in literature are linguistic and intellectual, and I hope we can highlight those, as well as political courage.”
-- Salman Rushdie

#Art #Real #Thinking
“The moment you declare a set of ideas to be immune from criticism, satire, derision, or contempt, freedom of thought becomes impossible.”
-- Salman Rushdie

#Ideas #Criticism #Impossible
“You can adhere to your faith, but that faith needs to march in line with the rest of the world and needs to find a way of expressing itself in the modern world.”
-- Salman Rushdie

#World #Lines #Way
“It matters, it always matters, to name rubbish as rubbish ... to do otherwise is to legitimize it.”
-- Salman Rushdie

#Names #Rubbish #Matter
“I think the business of writing a great deal of it is the business of paying attention to your characters, to the world they live in, to the story you have to tell, but just a kind of deep attention and out of that if you pay attention properly the story will tell you what it needs.”
-- Salman Rushdie

#Character #Writing #Thinking
“Cruelty is not a literary value.”
-- Salman Rushdie

#Cruelty #Values
“Discovery is fun. I am incredibly open to everything.”
-- Salman Rushdie

#Fun #Discovery
“What kind of idea are you? Are you the kind that compromises, does deals, accomodates itself to society, aims to find a niche, to survive; or are you the cussed, bloody-minded, ramrod-backed type of damnfool notion that would rather break than sway with the breeze? â€“ The kind that will almost certainly, ninety-nine times out of hundred, be smashed to bits; but, the hundredth time, will change the world.”
-- Salman Rushdie

#Life #Ideas #World
“Between the adored and the adorer falls the shadow.”
-- Salman Rushdie

#Fall #Shadow
“I've always thought that one of the things that the Internet and the gaming world permits as a narrative technique is to not tell the story from beginning to end - to tell stories sideways, to give alternative possibilities that the reader can, in a way, choose between.”
-- Salman Rushdie

#Giving #Alternatives #Stories
“Five mysteries hold the keys to the unseen: the act of love, and the birth of a baby, and the contemplation of great art, and being in the presence of death or disaster, and hearing the human voice lifted in song.”
-- Salman Rushdie

#Song #Baby #Art
“When people use the term magic realism, usually they only mean 'magic' and they don't hear 'realism', whereas the way in which magic realism actually works is for the magic to be rooted in the real. It's both things. It's not just a fairytale moment. It's the surrealism that arises out of the real.”
-- Salman Rushdie

#Real #Mean #People
“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.”
-- Salman Rushdie

#Atheist #Ideas #Religion

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