All SALMAN RUSHDIE Quotes about “Language”

“Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true.”
“We were language's magpies by nature, stealing whatever sounded bright and shiny.”
“The only privilege literature deserves - and this privilege it requires in order to exist - is the privilege of being in the arena of discourse, the place where the struggle of our languages can be acted out.”
“Language upon a silvered tongue affords enchantment enough.”
“He had picked up languages the way most sailors pick up diseases; languages were his gonorrhoea, his syphilis, his scurvy, his ague, his plague.”
“English, no longer, an English language, now grows from many roots.”
“And at the end of the day, there was an attempt to suppress a book. The book wasn't suppressed. It's freely available in whatever it is, close to 50 languages. There was an attempt to suppress the writer. And I'm happy to say the writer wasn't suppressed.”
“I don't think I've ever quite grown out of it, actually. There was a point where I could recite some of those Elvish verses - which I've mercifully forgotten. But I can still, if really pushed, recite the text of the inside of the ruling ring in the language of Mordor.”
“If you listen to the urban speech patterns there you'll find it's quite characteristic that a sentence will begin in one language, go through a second language and end in a third. It's the very playful, very natural result of juggling languages. You are always reaching for the most appropriate phrase.”
“I don't think it is always necessary to take up the anti-colonial -- or is it post-colonial? -- cudgels against English. What seems to me to be happening is that those people who were once colonized by the language are now rapidly remaking it, domesticating it, becoming more and more relaxed about the way they use it -- assisted by the English language's enormous flexibility and size, they are carving out large territories for themselves within its frontiers.”

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