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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 from going to sleep.

— Salman Rushdie The Satanic Verses (1988)

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Poetry

More quotes by Salman Rushdie

The only people who see the whole picture are the ones who step outside the frame.

The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999)

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

Imaginary Homelands p. 391 (1992)

I do not envy people who think they have a complete explanation of the world, for the simple reason that they are obviously wrong.

Salman Rushdie — Talking with David Frost (1993)

Those who oppose the novel most vociferously today are of the opinion that intermingling with a different culture will inevitably weaken and ruin their own. I am of the opposite opinion.

Imaginary Homelands (1992)

To choose unbelief is to choose mind over dogma, to trust in our humanity instead of all these dangerous divinities.

All Salman Rushdie quotes →

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There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet.

Ralph Waldo Emerson Nature (1836)

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.

T. S. Eliot Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919)

Poetry, unlike oratory, should not aim at clarity...but be dense with meaning, 'something to be chewed and digested'.

George Chapman Ovid's Banquet of Sense (1595)

I am no poet, but if you think for yourselves, as I proceed, the facts will form a poem in your minds.

Michael Faraday

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Salman Rushdie (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.