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All Migrants Leave Their Pasts Behind, Although Some Try To Pack It Into Bundles And Boxes-but On The Journey Something Seeps Out Of The Treasured Mementoes And Old Photographs, Until Even Their Owners Fail To Recognize Them, Because It Is The Fate Of Migrants To Be Stripped Of History, To Stand Naked Amidst The Scorn Of Strangers Upon Whom They See Rich Clothing, The Brocades Of Continuity And The Eyebrows Of Belonging.

-Salman Rushdie

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All Migrants Leave Their

Salman Rushdie

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All Migrants Leave Their Pasts Behind, Although Some Try To Pack It Into Bundles And Boxes-but On The Journey Something Seeps Out Of The Treasured Mementoes And Old Photographs, Until Even Their Owners Fail To Recognize Them, Because It Is The Fate Of Migrants To Be Stripped Of History, To Stand Naked Amidst The Scorn Of Strangers Upon Whom They See Rich Clothing, The Brocades Of Continuity And The Eyebrows Of Belonging.

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It Seems That The Right Of Freedom Of Speech That Was Enshrined In Numerous Constitutions Is Now Under Attack By Religious Institutions.

Freedom Of Speech

I Am Certainly Not A Good Muslim. But I Am Able Now To Say That I Am Muslim; In Fact It Is A Source Of Happiness To Say That I Am Now Inside, And A Part Of The Community Whose Values Have Always Been Closest To My Heart.

When You Are Making An Independent Film, Money Is Never An Issue.

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?

World Religions

Fundamentalists Of All Faiths Are The Fundamental Evil Of Our Time.

How Does Newness Come Into The World? How Is It Born? Of What Fusions, Translations, Conjoinings Is It Made? How Does It Survive, Extreme And Dangerous As It Is? What Compromises, What Deals, What Betrayals Of Its Secret Nature Must It Make To Stave Off The Wrecking Crew, The Exterminating Angel, The Guillotine? Is Birth Always A Fall? Do Angels Have Wings? Can Men Fly?

It May Be Argued That The Past Is A Country From Which We Have All Emigrated, That Its Loss Is Part Of Our Common Humanity.

It's Always Been Colossally Important To Me That My Books Should Be Well Received In India. It's Where I Come From.

As I Look Back, I Feel A Touch Of Pride At My Younger Self's Dedication To Literature, Which Gave Him The Strength Of Mind To Resist The Blandishments Of The Enemies Of Promise. The Sirens Of Ad-land Sang Sweetly And Seductively, But I Thought Of Odysseus Lashing Himself To The Mast Of His Ship, And Somehow Stayed On Course.

Every Day Is For The Thief, By Turns Funny, Mournful, And Acerbic, Offers A Portrait Of Nigeria In Which Anger, Perhaps The Most Natural Response To The Often Lamentable State Of Affairs There, Is Somehow Muted And Deflected By The Author's Deep Engagement With The Country: A Profoundly Disenchanted Love. Teju Cole Is Among The Most Gifted Writers Of His Generation.

Go For Broke. Always Try And Do Too Much. Dispense With Safety Nets. Take A Deep Breath Before You Begin.

Out-of-step Intellectuals Like Noam Chomsky And The Deceased Edward Said Have Often Been Dismissed As Crazy Extremists, 'anti-american,' And In Mr. Said's Case Even, Absurdly, As Apologists For Palestinian 'terrorism.'

You Don't That Often See Writers Being Sought Out When There Are Matters Of Great Moment To Discuss. And I Think That's A Loss.

Acting Was Always My Unscratched Itch, When I Was In College And Even Afterwards.

Sometimes By A Woodland Stream He Watched The Water Rush Over The Pebbled Bed, Its Tiny Modulations Of Bounce And Flow. A Woman's Body Was Like That. If You Watched It Carefully Enough You Could See How It Moved To The Rhythm Of The World, The Deep Rhythm, The Music Below The Music, The Truth Below The Truth. He Believed In This Hidden Truth The Way Other Men Believed In God Or Love, Believed That Truth Was In Fact Always Hidden, That The Apparent, The Overt, Was Invariably A Kind Of Lie.

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.

The First Amendment Defends All Forms Of Speech Including Hate Speech, Which Is Why Groups Like Ku Klux Klan Are Allowed To Utter Their Poisonous Remarks.

I Needed My Stuff Around Me, And In That Little Cocoon I Felt Good, And I Could Work.

In Early Islam, It Was An Absolute Tenet That The Prophet Was Not To Be Worshipped. The Prophet Was A Messenger. And One Of The Things That's Happened In Islam Is This Cult Of The Prophet, Which To My View Is Counter To The Original Tradition.

I Grew Up In A Family In Which There Was Very Little Religion. My Father Wasn't Religious At All. But He Was Really Interested In The Subject Of, You Know, The Birth And Growth Of Islam. And He Basically Transmitted That Interest To Me.

If You're Offended, It's Your Problem.

To Be Born Again,' Sang Gibreal Farishta Tumbling From The Heaveans, 'first You Have To Die. Ho Ji! Ho Ji! To Land Upon The Bosomy Earth, First One Needs To Fly Tat-taa! Takatun! How To Ever Smile Again, If First You Won't Cry? How To Win The Darling's Love Mister, Without A Sigh?

We Have Come To Think Of Taking Offence As A Fundamental Right. We Value Very Little More Highly Than Our Rage, Which Gives Us, In Our Opinion, The Moral High Ground. From There We Can Shoot Down At Our Enemies And Inflict Heavy Fatalities.

Moral High Ground

The Only People Who See The Whole Picture,' He Murmured, 'are The Ones Who Step Out Of The Frame.

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In Europe, The Enlightenment Of The 18th Century Was Seen As A Battle Against The Desire Of The Church To Limit Intellectual Freedom, A Battle Against The Inquisition, A Battle Against Religious Censorship. And The Victory Of The Enlightenment In Europe Was Seen As Pushing Religion Away From The Center Of Power. In America, At The Same Time, The Enlightenment Meant Coming To A Country Where People Were Not Going To Persecute You By Reason Of Your Religion. So It Meant A Liberation Into Religion. In Europe, It Was Liberation Out Of Religion.

As Human Knowledge Has Grown, It Has Also Become Plain That Every Religious Story Ever Told About How We Got Here Is Quite Simply Wrong. This, Finally, Is What All Religions Have In Common. They Didn't Get It Right.

The Only Thing Worse Than A Bad Review From The Ayatollah Khomeini Would Be A Good Review From The Ayatollah Khomeini.

When I Was Writing The Satanic Verses, If You Had Asked Me About The Phenomenon That We All Now Know As Radical Islam, I Wouldn't Have Had Much To Say. As Recently As The Mid-1980s, It Didn't Seem To Be A Big Deal.

Who What Am I? My Answer: I Am The Sum Total Of Everything That Went Before Me, Of All I Have Been Seen Done, Of Everything Done-to-me. I Am Everyone Everything Whose Being-in-the-world Affected Was Affected By Mine. I Am Anything That Happens After I’ve Gone Which Would Not Have Happened If I Had Not Come. Nor Am I Particularly Exceptional In This Matter; Each "i", Every One Of The Now-six-hundred-million-plus Of Us, Contains A Similar Multitude. I Repeat For The Last Time: To Understand Me, You’ll Have To Swallow The World.

Unless, Of Course, There's No Such Thing As Chance;...in Which Case, We Should Either-optimistically-get Up And Cheer, Because If Everything Is Planned In Advance, Then We All Have A Meaning And Are Spared The Terror Of Knowing Ourselves To Be Random, Without A Why; Or Else, Of Course, We Might-as Pessimists-give Up Right Here And Now, Understanding The Futility Of Thought Decision Action, Since Nothing We Think Makes Any Difference Anyway, Things Will Be As They Will. Where, Then, Is Optimism? In Fate Or In Chaos?

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I Always Thought Storytelling Was Like Juggling [...] You Keep A Lot Of Different Tales In The Air, And Juggle Them Up And Down, And If You're Good You Don't Drop Any.

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The Glamour Of Being Forbidden Must Not Be Underestimated.

To Understand Just One Life You Have To Swallow The World ... Do You Wonder, Then, That I Was A Heavy Child?

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Throughout Human History, The Apostles Of Purity, Those Who Have Claimed To Possess A Total Explanation, Have Wrought Havoc Among Mere Mixed-up Human Beings.

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Anyone Who Has Had The Experience Of Going Through American Security Checks Knows The Purpose Of These Checks Is Not To Make You Safer; It's Just To Annoy You.

Hyperrealism Can Create An Atmosphere Of Surrealism Because Nobody Sees The World In Such Detail.

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Speaking As Somebody With Three Sisters And A Very Largely Female Muslim Family, There Is Not A Single Woman I Know In My Family Or In Their Friends Who Would Have Accepted The Wearing Of A Veil.

If You Have Children You Worry About The World You're Leaving Them.

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I Grew Up Kissing Books And Bread.

The Writers Of The French Enlightenment Had Deliberately Used Blasphemy As A Weapon, Refusing To Accept The Power Of The Church To Set Limiting Points On Thought.

It's One Thing To Say, 'i Don't Like What You Said To Me And I Find It Rude And Offensive,' But The Moment You Threaten Violence In Return, You've Taken It To Another Level, Where You Lose Whatever Credibility You Had.

Rohinton Mistry's Celebrated Novel 'such A Long Journey' Was Pulled Off The Syllabus Of Mumbai University Because Local Extremists Objected To Its Content.

My Parents Gave Me The Gift Of Irreligion, Of Growing Up Without Bothering To Ask People What Gods They Held Dear, Assuming That In Fact, Like My Parents, They Weren't Interested In Gods, And That This Uninterest Was 'normal.' You May Argue That The Gift Was A Poisoned Chalice, But Even If So, That's A Cup From Which I'd Happily Drink Again.

The Only Position When Violence Is Threatened In Response To A Novel Or A Cartoon Or A Crappy Youtube Video Is A No-surrender Position. This Is How We Live. We Live In A Country In Which We Have These Rights, And We're Not Going To Give Them Up. Full Stop. The End.

Free Speech Is Life Itself.

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Freedom Of Speech

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My Heart Broke Open And History Fell In.

I Became A Writer Because I Got Addicted To Story. The First Storyteller In My Life Was My Father.

When I Was Growing Up, Everyone Around Me Was Fond Of Fooling Around With Words. It Was Certainly Common In My Family, But I Think It Is Typical Of Bombay, And Maybe Of India, That There Is A Sense Of Play In The Way People Use Language.

Meaning Is A Shaky Edifice We Build Out Of Scraps, Dogmas, Childhood Injuries, Newspaper Articles, Chance Remarks, Old Fillms, Small Victories, People Hated, People Loved; Perhaps It Is Because Our Sense Of What Is The Case Is Constructed From Such Inadequate Materials That We Defend It So Fiercely, Even To Death.

People Must Be Protected From Prejudice Against Their Person. But People Cannot Be Protected From Prejudice Against Their Ideas - Because Otherwise We're All Done.

Exile Is A Dream Of A Glorious Return. Exile Is A Vision Of Revolution: Elba, Not St Helena. It Is An Endless Paradox: Looking Forward By Always Looking Back. The Exile Is A Ball Hurled High Into The Air.

I Make No Complaint. I Am A Writer. I Do Not Accept My Condition; I Will Strive To Change It; But I Inhabit It, I Am Trying To Learn From It.

British Society Has Never Been Cleansed Of The Filth Of Imperialism.

Perhaps The Story You Finish Is Never The One You Begin.

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England In A Way Is Lucky. It's An Island, So The Frontiers Are Given By The Sea.

Bread And Books: Food For The Body And Food For The Soul - What Could Be More Worthy Of Our Respect, And Even Love?

Someone Asked Me If I Was Afraid To Write My Memoirs. I Told Him: 'we Have To Stop Drawing Up Accounts Of Fear! We Live In A Society In Which People Are Allowed To Tell Their Story, And That Is What I Do.'

I Have Had Many More Close Women Friends Than Men, And I've Always Assumed That Comes From The Fact That In My Family There Was Such A Disproportionate Female Element.

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We Live In A Frightened Time, And People Self-censor All The Time And Are Afraid Of Going Into Some Subjects Because They Are Worried About Violent Reactions.

It's True That The Human Body Is More Vulnerable Than The Products Of The Human Mind.

And Using That - The Birth Of A Religion, It Suggests That You Have Got Two Tests. You Have The Test Of Weakness. When You're Weak, Do You Compromise, Do You Bend, Do You Give In, Do You Accommodate? And Then The Test Of Strength. When You're Strong, Are You Merciful, Are You Generous, Or Are You Cruel?

Once You Put A Thought Into The World, It Can Be Disagreed With, But It Can't Be Unthought.

So When I Studied History At Cambridge, I Did A Special Subject In That, Exactly That. And Then Actually That - While I Was Studying It Was Where I Came Across The So-called Incident Of The Satanic Verses.

...in Words And Pickles, I Have Immortalized My Memories, Although Distortions Are Inevitable In Both Methods. We Must Live, I'm Afraid, With The Shadows Of Imperfections.

They Lived In A Great City, A Metropolis Of Many Narratives That Converged Briefly And Then Separated For Ever, Discovering Their Different Dooms In That Crowd Of Stories Through Which All Of Us, Following Our Own Destinies, Had To Push And Shove To Find Our Way Through, Or Out.

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The Gamble Of Literature Is That I Make The Best Work I Can; The Most Truthful, The Most Representative Of How I See Things. I Try And Do That And Then I Put It Out There And Say To You, "what Do You Think?" I Hope That You Think Well Of It, Obviously.

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Every Time You Finish A Book, You Have A Terrible Feeling That There's Just Never Going To Be Another One. But Fortunately, So Far, The Next One Has Always Shown Up.

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Khattam-shud,' He Said Slowly, 'is The Arch-enemy Of All Stories, Even Of Language Itself. He Is The Prince Of Silence And The Foe Of Speech. And Because Everything Ends, Because Dreams End, Stories End, Life Ends, At The Finish Of Everything We Use His Name. "it's Finished," We Tell One Another, "it's Over. Khattam-shud: The End.

War Used To Be Something You Could Stand On The Nearby Hill And Watch. Now We Have Total War; Everybody's In It. We Have Total Economics As Well. Everything Affects Everybody. The Malaysian Currency Shakes, And People Around The World Are Seriously Affected.

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I Don't Think There Is A Need For An Entity Like God In My Life.

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This Paranoid Islam, Which Blames Outsider, 'infidels', For All The Ills Of Muslim Societies, And Whose Proposed Remedy Is The Closing Of Those Societies To The Rival Project Of Modernity, Is Presently The Fastest Growing Version Of Islam In The World.

In The End, You Write The Book That Grabs You By The Throat And Demands To Be Written.

I Know That When People Pull Apart, They Usually Employ Misunderstanding As A Weapon, Deliberately Getting Hold Of The Stick's Wrong End, Impaling Themselves On Its Point In Order To Prove The Perfidy Of The Other.

I've Been Worrying About God A Little Bit Lately... It Seems Like He's Been In A Bad Mood. And I Think It Has To Do With The Quality Of Lovers He's Been Getting.

I Have Always Thought That These Two Ways Of Talking, One Is The Fantastic, The Fable, The Fairy Tale, And The Other Being History, The Scholarly Study Of What Happened, I Think They're Both Amazing Ways To Understand Human Nature.

Free Speech Is The Whole Thing, The Whole Ball Game. Free Speech Is Life Itself.

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Free-form Games In Which The Player Can Make Choices About What The Game Is Going To Be, Become A Kind Of Gaming Equivalent Of The Narrative Possibility.

I Write Books I'd Enjoy Reading, I'm The Reader Standing Behind My Shoulder.

I'll Tell You What Divorce Hasn't Taught Me. It Didn't Teach Me Not To Get Married Again.

You Can't Have Modern States Based On Ideas Which Have Been Out Of Date For A Thousand Years.

Among The Great Struggles Of Man-good/evil, Reason/unreason, Etc.-there Is Also This Mighty Conflict Between The Fantasy Of Home And The Fantasy Of Away, The Dream Of Roots And The Mirage Of The Journey.

Two Things Form The Bedrock Of Any Open Society - Freedom Of Expression And Rule Of Law. If You Don't Have Those Things, You Don't Have A Free Country.

Normally When I Read, I Don't Like Music Playing.

Many Of Us Didn't Believe In The Image Of Bin Laden As A Wandering Old Man Of The Mountains, Living On Plants And Insects In An Inhospitable Cave Somewhere On The Porous Pakistan-afghan Border.

Not All Possibilities Are Open To Us. The World Is Finite; Our Hopes Spill Over Its Rim.

I've Never Yet Managed To Write A Novel Which Didn't Have An Indian Central Character.

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.

My Horizon's Have Shrunk And I Have Only Endings To Write.

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Falling In Love

She Saw Him Fracture Into Rainbow Colors Through The Prism Of Her Love.

Travel Was Pointless. It Removed You From The Place In Which You Had A Meaning, And To Which You Gave Meaning In Return By Dedicating Your Life To It, And It Spirited You Away Into Fairylands Where You Were, And Looked, Frankly Absurd.

Originality Is Dangerous. It Challenges, Questions, Overturns Assumptions, Unsettles Moral Codes.

I'm A Big-city Boy. What I Like Is Big Cities. It's Not Just What I Like. It's What I Write About.

I Have Been Only The Humblest Jugglers-with-facts; And That, In A Country Where The Truth Is What It Is Instructed To Be, Reality Quite Literally Ceases To Exist, So That Everything Becomes Possible Except What We Are Told Is The Case; And Maybe This Was The Difference Between My Indian Childhood And Pakistani Adolescence--that In The First I Was Beset By An Infinity Of Alternative Realities, While In The Second I Was Adrift, Disoriented, Amid An Equally Infinite Number Of Falsenesses, Unrealities And Lies.

Good Advice Is Rarer Than Rubies.

Raif Badawi's Is An Important Voice For All Of Us To Hear.

The Great Concern Is That Year After Year, Rising Numbers Of Journalists Are Being Killed In Pursuit Of Their Work. They Are Increasingly Seen As Not Being Neutral But Rather As Combatants By One Side Or The Other.

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.

Once You Have Been In An Earthquake You Know, Even If You Survive Without A Scratch, That Like A Stroke In The Heart, It Remains In The Earth's Breast, Horribly Potential, Always Promising To Return, To Hit You Again, With An Even More Devastating Force.

Freedom To Reject Is The Only Freedom.

The Act Of Migration Puts Into Crisis Everything About The Migrating Individual Or Group, Everything About Identity And Selfhood And Culture And Belief. So If This Is A Novel About Migration It Must Be That Act Of Putting In Question. It Must Perform The Crisis It Describes.

I've Always Prided Myself On My Discipline As A Writer. I Do It Like A Job. I Get Up In The Morning And Go To My Desk.

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Perhaps, If One Wishes To Remain An Individual In The Midst Of The Teeming Multitudes, One Must Make Oneself Grotesque.

Certainly, Poverty And Economic Decline Have A Lot To Do With The So-called Rage Of Islam. You've Got All These Young Men In Countries Which Are Economically In Bad Shape. The Idea That They Might Be Able To Make A Good Living And Get Married And Have A Family, A Decent Life, Seems Very Remote To A Lot Of People In A Lot Of The World.

To See Things Plainly, You Have To Cross A Frontier.

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Until You Know Who You Are You Can’t Write.

To Put It As Simply As Possible: I Am Not A Muslim.[...] I Do Not Accept The Charge Of Apostacy, Because I Have Never In My Adult Life Affirmed Any Belief, And What One Has Not Affirmed One Can Not Be Said To Have Apostasized From. The Islam I Know States Clearly That 'there Can Be No Coercion In Matters Of Religion'. The Many Muslims I Respect Would Be Horrified By The Idea That They Belong To Their Faith Purely By Virtue Of Birth, And That A Person Who Freely Chose Not To Be A Muslim Could Therefore Be Put To Death.

We Cannot Allow Religious Hooligans To Place Limiting Points On Thought.

Discovery Is Fun. I Am Incredibly Open To Everything.

I Don't Dictate To Anyone What To Believe And What Not To. And I Don't Want That To Be Dictated To Me Either.

If There Were Israeli Attacks On Iranian Nuclear Facilities, It Makes It Certain There Would Be A Reprisal Attack Against The United States At Some Point.

It's Difficult Not To Color Our Perception Of Author's Product With His Personality. There Are So Many Examples Of This. What Do We Think Of Ezra Pound - Clearly A Great Poet And Clearly Kind Of An Asshole? You Can Say The Same Thing About Louis-ferdinand Céline, Who Clearly Was A Nazi Sympathizer, And Yet One Of The Great Writers Of The 20th Century. It Is Tough, But There Are Enough Examples Around Where We Have To Somehow Find A Way Of Separating The Work From The Artist And Seeing What There Is To See In The Work, While Also Condemning The Thoughts We See In The Man.

One Either Loves, Or Waits For Love, Or Banishes Love For Good. That Is The Full Range Of Possible Choices.

One Of The Extraordinary Things About Human Events Is That The Unthinkable Becomes Thinkable.

Extraordinary Things

Between Shame And Shamelessness Lies The Axis Upon Which We Turn; Meteorological Conditions At Both These Poles Are Of The Most Extreme, Ferocious Type. Shamelessness, Shame: The Roots Of Violence.

What's The Use Of Stories That Aren't Even True?

If A Birth Is The Fall-out From The Explosion Caused By The Union Of Two Unstable Elements, Then Perhaps A Half-life Is All We Can Expect.

Abraham Zogoiby Covered His Face That Night In August 1939 Because He Had Been Assailed By Fear, [...] A Sudden Apprehension That The Ugliness Of Life Might Defeat Its Beauty; That Love Did Not Make Lovers Invulnerable. Nevertheless, He Thought, Even If The World's Beauty And Love Were On The Edge Of Destruction, Theirs Would Still Be The Only Side To Be On; Defeated Love Would Still Be Love, Hate's Victory Would Not Make It Other Than It Was.

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.

The Only Way Of Living In A Free Society Is To Feel That You Have The Right To Say And Do Stuff.

My Children Are English, And Both Of Their Mothers Were English.

In The Waking Dreams Our Societies Permit, In Our Myths, Our Arts, Our Songs, We Celebrate The Nonbelongers, The Different Ones, The Outlaws, The Freaks.

Most Of What Matters In Your Life Takes Place In Your Absence.

One Of The Reasons My Name Is Rushdie Is That My Father Was An Admirer Of Ibn Rush'd, The 12th Century Arab Philosopher Known As Averroes In The West. In His Time, He Was Making The Non-literalist Case For Interpreting The Koran.

In The Experience Of Art, Time Seems Not To Exist. When I'm Writing And Think, "i've Been Working For Two Hours," I've Actually Been Working For Seven.

If Turkey Wants To Join Europe, It Will Have To Become A European Country, And That Might Take A Long Time.

The Suicide Bomber's Imagination Leads Him To Believe In A Brilliant Act Of Heroism, When In Fact He Is Simply Blowing Himself Up Pointlessly And Taking Other People's Lives.

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.

If You Actually Want To Change Your World, There Is A Better Way Of Doing It Than Blowing Yourself Up.

It Matters, It Always Matters, To Name Rubbish As Rubbish; That To Do Otherwise Is To Legitimize It.

Sometimes Great, Banned Works Defy The Censor's Description And Impose Themselves On The World - 'ulysses,' 'lolita,' The 'arabian Nights.'

The Answer To Religion Is Not No Religion, But Another Way Of Thinking Of It. Another Way Of Being In It.

The Problem Of Telling Contemporary History Is That Your Message Gets Outdated.

She's No Flibberti-gibberti Mamzell, But A Whir-stir-get-lost-sir Bundla Dynamite!

We Must Conclude That It Is Not Only A Particular Political Ideology That Has Failed, But The Idea That Men And Women Could Ever Define Themselves In Terms That Exclude Their Spiritual Needs.

Writers Have An Opinion About The World And Offer Arguments About The World. They Should Offer Contemplation.

An Iceberg Is Water Striving To Be Land; A Mountain, Especially A Himalaya, Especially Everest, Is Land's Attempt To Metamorphose Into Sky; It Is Grounded In Flight, The Earth Mutated--nearly--into Air, And Become, In The True Sense, Exalted. Long Before She Ever Encountered The Mountain, Allie Was Aware Of Its Brooding Presence In Her Soul.

Vertigo Is The Conflict Between The Fear Of Falling And The Desire To Fall.

When You Know What You're Against You Have Taken The First Step To Discovering What You're For.

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.

I Didn't Want To Become Some Embittered Old Hack Getting His Revenge For The Rest Of My Life. And I Didn't Want To Become Some Scared Creature Cowering In A Corner. I Remember Telling Myself Not To Carry The Hatred Around, Although I Know Where It Is. I Have It In A Trunk In Storage.

I Do Not Envy People Who Think They Have A Complete Explanation Of The World, For The Simple Reason That They Are Obviously Wrong.

Our Lives Are Not What We Deserve; They Are, Let Us Agree, In Many Ways Deficient.

I Admit It: Above All Things, I Fear Absurdity.

Literature Is The One Place In Any Society Where, Within The Secrecy Of Our Own Heads, We Can Hear Voices Talking About Everythingin Every Possible Way. The Reason For Ensuring That That Privileged Arena Is Preserved Is Not That Writers Want The Absolute Freedom To Say And Do Whatever They Please. It Is That We, All Of Us, Readers And Writers And Citizens And Generals And Goodmen, Need That Little, Unimportant-looking Room. We Do Not Need To Call It Sacred, But We Do Need To Remember That It Is Necessary.

The Way You Write A Screenplay Is That You Close Your Eyes And Run The Movie In Your Head And Then You Write It Down.

People Would Come And Threaten Them. And They Would Respond By Putting The Book In The Window. Behind That, The Publishers, Many Of Whom Were Menaced And Receiving Anonymous Phone Calls Of The Very Menacing Kind And So, Almost Everybody - Not Everybody, But Almost Everybody Held The Line.

We Were Language's Magpies By Nature, Stealing Whatever Sounded Bright And Shiny.

All Names Mean Something.

If Terrorism Is To Be Defeated, The World Of Islam Must Take On Board The Secularist-humanist Principles On Which The Modern Is Based, And Without Which Their Countries' Freedom Will Remain A Distant Dream.

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