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Both John F. Kennedy And Nelson Mandela Use The Same Three-word Phrase Which In My Mind Says It All, Which Is ‘freedom Is Indivisible. You Can’t Slice It Up, Otherwise It Ceases To Be Freedom. You Can Dislike Charlie Hebdo … But The Fact That You Dislike Them Has Nothing To Do With Their Right To Speak.

-Salman Rushdie

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Both John F. Kennedy

Salman Rushdie

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Both John F. Kennedy And Nelson Mandela Use The Same Three-word Phrase Which In My Mind Says It All, Which Is ‘freedom Is Indivisible. You Can’t Slice It Up, Otherwise It Ceases To Be Freedom. You Can Dislike Charlie Hebdo … But The Fact That You Dislike Them Has Nothing To Do With Their Right To Speak.

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The Real Risks For Any Artist Are Taken In Pushing The Work To The Limits Of What Is Possible, In The Attempt To Increase The Sum Of What It Is Possible To Think. Books Become Good When They Go To This Edge And Risk Falling Over It -when They Endanger The Artist By Reason Of What He Has, Or Has Not, Artistically Dared.

I Don't Think There Really Is Much Of A Left In America, Certainly By European Standards Even The Left Is Quite Right Wing Here.

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.

I Believe In The Art Of Literature, I Believe In Freedom Of The Imagination, I Believe In The Kind Of Liberties That We Enjoy In These Lucky Countries Of The World.

The Question I'm Always Asking Myself Is: Are We Masters Or Victims? Do We Make History, Or Does History Make Us? Do We Shape The World, Or Are We Just Shaped By It? The Question Of Do We Have Agency In Our Lives Or Whether We Are Just Passive Victims Of Events Is, I Think, A Great Question, And One That I Have Always Tried To Ask.

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.

I Beat My Sons In Real-life Table Tennis, But Virtually, I Get Murdered. I Download Games On The Iphone That I'm Addicted To - I'm A Master At "angry Birds."

The World, Somebody Wrote, Is The Place We Prove Real By Dying In It.

It Is Often Said By Religious People That Without Its Framework, There Is No Sense Of Right Or Wrong. My View Is That Religion Comes After Ethics.

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

Music, Love, Death. Certainly A Triangle Of Sorts; Maybe Even An Eternal One. "the Only People Who Can See The Whole Picture," He Murmured, "are The Ones Who Step Out Of The Frame."

In The Cookie Of Life, Friends Are The Chocolate Chips.

When...did It Become Irrational To Dislike Religion, Any Religion, Even To Dislike It Vehemently? When Did Reason Get Redescribed As Unreason? When Were The Fairy Stories Of The Superstitious Placed Above Criticism, Beyond Satire? A Religion Was Not A Race. It Was An Idea, And Ideas Stood (or Fell) Because They Were Strong Enough (or Too Weak) To Withstand Criticism, Not Because They Were Shielded From It. Strong Ideas Welcomed Dissent.

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.

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.

Cruelty Is Not A Literary Value.

I Have No Problem With People's Religious Beliefs. I Just Don't Happen To Have Any.

As Though She Had Entered A Fable, As Though She Were No More Than Words Crawling Along A Dry Page, Or As Though She Were Becoming That Page Itself, That Surface On Which Her Story Would Be Written And Across Which There Blew A Hot And Merciless Wind, Turning Her Body To Papyrus, Her Skin To Parchment, Her Soul To Paper.

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

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

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.

Censorship Is The Thing That Stops You Doing What You Want To Do, And What Writers Want To Talk About Is What They Do, Not What Stops Them Doing It.

Doing What You Want

I Think The Book Is Less Emotional Than The Film. With The Film, The Emotions Are Much More Raw And In Front. In The Book, They Are Kind Of Ironized And Seen Through Comedy.

Science Fiction Is Where I Started Out, Really. When I Was A Kid, I Was A Complete Addict Of Science Fiction. It Was One Of My Earliest Interests As A Writer, And I've Just Taken A Long Time To Circle Back Around To It.

It's Obvious That I Come Down On The Side Of Free Speech For Anybody's Work.

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.

In This World Without Quiet Corners, There Can Be No Easy Escapes From History, From Hullabaloo, From Terrible, Unquiet Fuss.

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.

It May Be That The Books That Were Best Liked In Your Lifetime Are Not The Ones That Are Best Liked 100 Years Later.

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.

If Love Is A Yearning To Be Like (even To Become) The Beloved, Then Hatred, It Must Be Said, Can Be Engendered By The Same Ambition, When It Cannot Be Fulfilled.

Language Upon A Silvered Tongue Affords Enchantment Enough.

The Novel Does Not Seek To Establish A Privileged Language But It Insists Upon The Freedom To Portray And Analyze The Struggle Between The Different Contestants For Such Privileges.

Question: What Is The Opposite Of Faith? Not Disbelief. Too Final, Certain, Closed. Itself Is A Kind Of Belief. Doubt.

Very Often, People Who Actually Pick Up A Book Of Mine For The First Time Are Kind Of Surprised. And I Get These Letters Saying, Well, Who Knew That You Were Good, You Know?

Original Thought, Original Artistic Expression Is By Its Very Nature Questioning, Irreverent, Iconoclastic.

Original Thought

Sometimes We Feel We Straddle Two Cultures; At Other Times, That We Fall Between Two Stools.

I For One Don't Need A Supreme "sacred" Arbiter In Order To Be A Moral Being.

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'm Gone Which Would Not Have Happened If I Had Not Come.

I Think The Veil Is A Way Of Taking Power Away From Women.

For Me, 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.

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.

For Many People, I've Ceased To Be A Human Being. I've Become An Issue, A Bother, An "affair".... And Has It Really Been So Long Since Religions Persecuted People, Burning Them As Heretics, Drowning Them As Witches, That You Can't Recognize Religious Persecution When You See It?

Free Speech Is Life Itself.

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.

We Cannot Allow Religious Hooligans To Place 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.

Doubt, It Seems To Me, Is The Central Condition Of A Human Being In The Twentieth Century.

Because I've Always Felt, Whether The Fatwa Or Whatever, The Writer's Great Weapon Is The Truth And Integrity Of His Voice. And As Long As What You're Saying Is What You Truly, Honestly Believe To Be The Case, Then Whatever The Consequences, That's Fine. That's An Honorable Position.

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.

I Don't Read My Books, I Write Them. Once I've Finished The Many Years It Usually Takes Me To Write Them, I Can't Bear To Read Them, Because I've Spent Too Long With Them Already. I'm Not Advertising Them Very Well, Am I?

Freedom Is Not A Tea Party, India. Freedom Is A War.

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

Go For Broke. Always Try And Do Too Much. Dispense With Safety Nets. Take A Deep Breath Before You Begin Talking. Aim For The Stars. Keep Grinning. Be Bloody-minded. Argue With The World. And Never Forget That Writing Is As Close As We Get To Keeping A Hold On The Thousand And One Things--childhood, Certainties, Cities, Doubts, Dreams, Instants, Phrases, Parents, Loves--that Go On Slipping , Like Sand, Through Our Fingers.

It Is Commonly And, I Believe, Accurately Said Of Pakistan That Her Women Are Much More Impressive Than Her Men.

You Can't Assume If You Do Something Contentious That People Will Be On Your Side. The Moment Violence Enters The Story, The Story Changes. Then The Question Is, "how Do You Face Up To Violence?" And Then You Have To Have A No-compromise Position. And This Is Quite Simply A Lesson We Learn In The School Playground.

I Hate Admitting That My Enemies Have A Point.

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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.

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.

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.

The Field Of The Novel Is Very Rich. If You're A Composer, You're Well Aware Of The History Of Composition, And You Are Trying To Make Your Music Part Of That History. You're Not Ahistorical. In The Same Way, I Think, If You Write Now, You Are Writing In The Historical Context Of What The Novel Has Been And What Possibilities It Has Revealed.

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

Prophet Mohammed Would Have No Objection To The Satanic Verses.

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

I Have To Say That After Some Initial Resistance, I'm Now A Complete 'game Of Thrones' Addict.

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

The Chinese Are Good At Repression And Can Be Pretty Ruthless About It.

An Attack Upon Our Ability To Tell Stories Is Not Just Censorship - It Is A Crime Against Our Nature As Human Beings.

When You Are Writing A Book, It Feels As If You Are Simply Concentrating On The World Of The Book And That Whatever Is Happening In Your Personal Life Is Outside The Room, As It Were. But Maybe That's Just The Way You Have To Talk To Yourself To Make It Possible.

I Suppose Authoritarians Don't Like Being Made Fun Of Because Authoritarian Rulers Have A Very Inflated Sense Of Themselves And Don't Like Being Deflated, Which Makes It All The More Important To Continue To Deflate Them. These Are Very Courageous People Around The World Who Poke Fun From Inside These Societies. So, We Now Have To Broaden The Definition Of What We Mean By "writer" To Include Bloggers, Cartoonists, Song Writers, Visual Artists - All These People Are, In Different Ways, Quite Brave.

I've Never Rejected The World I Came From. To Be Rejected By It Is Horrible.

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.

The Lessons One Learns At School Are Not Always The Ones The School Thinks It's Teaching.

Self-censorship Is A Lie To Yourself; If You Are Going To Be Trying To Seriously Create Art, To Create Literary Art, And You Decide To Hold Back, To Censor Yourself, Then You Are A Fool To Yourself And It Would Be Better That You Kept Your Mouth Shut And Did Not Speak.

I Think, In A Written Novel, The Way In Which You Play With The Readers' Emotion Or The Way In Which You Engage The Readers' Emotions Can Be Very Indirect. You Could Come At It Through Irony Or Comedy, Etcetera, And You Could Capture People's Sympathies And Feelings Kind Of By Stealth If You Like.

Human Beings Do Not Perceive Things Whole; We Are Not Gods But Wounded Creatures, Cracked Lenses, Capably Only Of Fractured Perceptions. Partial Beings, In All The Senses Of That Phrase.

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

I Don't Know What To Say About Literary Critics. I Think It's Probably Best To Say Nothing.

There Is A Widespread Difficulty In The Muslim World, Which Has To Do With How The People Are Taught About Examining Their Own History. A Whole Range Of Stuff Has Been Placed Off Limits.

A Mature Society Understands That At The Heart Of Democracy Is Argument.

If I Were Asked For A One-sentence Sound Bite On Religion, I Would Say I Was Against It.

Chekhov Is This Poet Of Melancholy And Isolation And Of Wishing You Were Somewhere Else Than Where You Are.

Hell Is Other People's Fantasies.

Writers And Politicians Are Natural Rivals. Both Groups Try To Make The World In Their Own Images; They Fight For The Same Territory.

Where There Is No Belief, There Is No Blasphemy.

After A Long, Hopeless War, People Will Settle For Peace, At Almost Any Price.

Children Like Being A Little Scared, But They Don't Want To Be Disturbed.

I'm Not A Prophet, But I Always Thought It Was Natural For Dictatorships To Fall. I Remember In 1989, Two Months Before The Fall Of The Berlin Wall, Had You Said It Was Going To Happen No One Would Have Believed You. The System Seemed Powerful And Unbreakable. Suddenly Overnight It Blew Away Like Dust.

I've Met The Dalai Lama Briefly, But I Would Probably Say My Grandfather Was The Wisest Person I Ever Met. He Was My Mother's Father, An Indian, A Family Doctor, And Very Unlike Me In That He Was Deeply Religious.

You've Got A Generation Of Young Men - Almost All Are Young Men - In Situations Of Great Economic Hardship, Where They Don't Really Have Work. The Chances Of Them Making A Decent Life For Themselves, Of Making A Family, Living In A Kind Of Decent, Happy Way, Are Very, Very Remote. It's Very Hard For Them To Ever Even Have That As A Dream, So When People Are That Deprived Of The Ordinary Hope Of Human Beings, It Creates Anger. And That Anger Can Be Channeled By Unscrupulous Persons, Whether Secular Or Religious Leaders, And There's Been A Lot Of That.

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.

Youtube Is Full Of Pieces Of Trash. If You Want To Look On Youtube And Find Something That Insults You, You Can Probably Find It.

A Figure Of Speech Is A Shifty Thing; It Can Be Twisted Or It Can Be Straight.

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

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

If There Is A Choice Between Absolute Safety And Freedom, Then Freedom Must Always Prevail.

I Get A Lot Of Letters - A Lot Of Letters Saying, Who Knew That You Were Funny?

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

A Photograph Is A Moral Decision Taken In One Eighth Of A Second, Or One Sixteenth, Or One One-hundred-and-twenty-eighth. Snap Your Fingers; A Snapshot's Faster.

A Man Who Catches History's Eye Is Thereafter Bound To A Mistress From Whom He Will Never Escape.

Laila Lalami Has Fashioned An Absorbing Story Of One Of The First Encounters Between Spanish Conquistadores And Native Americans, A Frightening, Brutal, And Much-falsified History That Here, In Her Brilliantly Imagined Fiction, Is Rewritten To Give Us Something That Feels Very Like The Truth.

Native American

When I'm Writing A Book, Sentence By Sentence, I'm Not Thinking Theoretically. I'm Just Trying To Work Out The Story From Inside The Characters I've Got.

'the Satanic Verses' Was Denied The Ordinary Life Of A Novel. It Became Something Smaller And Uglier: An Insult.

A Thing That Happens To Migrants Is That They Lose Many Of The Traditional Things Which Root Identity, Which Root The Self.

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.

What Is Needed Is A Move Beyond Tradition, Nothing Less Than A Reform Movement To Bring The Core Concepts Of Islam Into The Modern Age, A Muslim Reformation To Combat Not Only The Jihadist Ideologues But Also The Dusty, Stifling Seminaries Of The Traditionalists, Throwing Open The Windows To Let In Much-needed Fresh Air.... It Is High Time, For Starters, That Muslims Were Able To Study The Revelation Of Their Religion As An Event Inside History, Not Supernaturally Above It.... Broad-mindedness Is Related To Tolerance; Open-mindedness Is The Sibling Of Peace.

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

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.

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

Happy Endings Must Come At The End Of Something,' The Walrus Pointed Out. 'if They Happen In The Middle Of A Story, Or An Adventure, Or The Like, All They Do Is Cheer Things Up For Awhile.

Like Everybody Else, I've Had Relationships In Which I Was Passionately In Love But Was Completely Miserable All The Time And Didn't Trust The Person I Was In Love With One Inch.

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.'

I Discovered That If You Find The Language To Talk To Younger Readers, Children Can Accept Anything.

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

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.

Nobody Ever Recognizes Themselves Unless They Are Not The Character. There Are Many People Who Have Claimed To Be In My Books, But Unfortunately They Were Usually People That I Didn't Know.

I Do Think Of Bombay As My Hometown. Those Are The Streets I Walked When I Was Learning To Walk. And It's The Place That My Imagination Has Returned To More Than Anywhere Else.

Once You Get That Instinct For The Fictiveness, The Fictionality Of Fiction, It Kind Of Sets You Free.

The History Of A Culture Can Be Determined By Its Untranslatable Words.

It Doesn't Matter Whether Characters Are Real People Or Not; If They're Not Vivid On The Page, Then The Reader Doesn't Care About Them That Much, And, If The Reader Doesn't Care About Them That Much, Then They Don't Care What Happens To Them.

Look At History. It's Not The Account Of A Species At Peace.

Too Many People Spouting Too Many Words, And In The End Those Words Will Turn To Bullets And Stones.

My Love For Dan Brown Knows No Bounds. It Literally Has No Mass.

When You Write You In A Way Write Out Of What You Think Of As Your Best Self, The Part Of You That Is Lacking In Foibles And Weaknesses And Egotism And Vanities And So On. You're Just Trying To Really Say Something As Truthful As You Can Out Of The Best That You Have In You.

The Response Of Anybody Interested In Liberty Is That We All Have A Say And The Ability To Have An Argument Is Exactly What Liberty Is, Even Though It May Never Be Resolved. In Any Authoritarian Society The Possessor Of Power Dictates, And If You Try And Step Outside He Will Come After You.

Optimism Is A Disease

I Don't Feel American. I Do Feel Like A New Yorker. I Think There's A Real Distinction There. A City Allows You To Become A Citizen Even When You're Not A National.

Obviously, A Rigid, Blinkered, Absolutist World View Is The Easiest To Keep Hold Of, Whereas The Fluid, Uncertain, Metamorphic Picture I've Always Carried About Is Rather More Vulnerable.

If You Want To Be A Serious Writer, Then You Have To Write What There Is To Write About. If You're Going To Pull Your Punches And Second-guess Yourself And Not Do Things Because You're Worried, Then Don't Write. Stay Home And Do Something Else.

Religion, A Mediaeval Form Of Unreason, When Combined With Modern Weaponry Becomes A Real Threat To Our Freedoms.

The Rate Of Change Is Global Now. I Think There's A Kind Of Mind That Is So Ill At Ease With That Transformation That It Reaches Out For Something Permanent. And Religious Faith Offers That, From Simplicities, Which You Are Told Are Eternal And Unchanging, And You Can Hold On To Those Like A Life Raft In A Metamorphosing World.

Airport Security Exists To Guard Us Against Terrorist Attacks.

Airport Security

[my Work] Is A Love Song To Our Mongrel Selves.

If You Live In Free Countries, You Don't Have To Spend All Your Life Arguing About Freedom Because It Is All Around You. It Seems Redundant To Make A Lot Of Noise About Something When, In Fact, There It Is. But If Someone Tries To Remove It, It Becomes Important For You To Formulate Your Own Defenses Of It.

He Would Dream Of Discovering A Magic Optometrist From Whom He Would Purchase A Pair Of Green-tinged Spectacles Which Would Correct His Regrettable Myopia, And After That He Would Be Able To See Through The Dense, Blinding Air To The Fabulous World Beneath.

Liberate Yourself, Because No One Else Is Going To Liberate You

Gym Motivational

If You Take A Look At History, You Will Find That The Understanding Of What Is Good And Evil Has Always Existed Before The Individual Religions. The Religions Were Only Invented By People Afterwards, In Order To Express This Idea.

Anyone Who Reads My Work Will See That There Are Often Difficult Relationships Between Fathers And Sons.

Difficult Relationship

I Do Think That There Is Such A Thing As Human Nature, And That The Things That We Have In Common Are Perhaps Greater Than The Things That Divide Us.

Too Many People Had Spent Too Long Demonizing Or Totemizing Me To Listen Seriously To What I Had To Say.

All Names Mean Something.

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

There's A Lot Of Conflict And Darkness Inside Everybody's Family. We All Pretend To Outsiders That It's Not So But Behind Locked Doors There Are Usually High Emotions Running.

The Muslim Population In India Is, Largely Speaking, Not Radicalised. From The Beginning, They Were Always Very Secular-minded.

American Literature Has Always Been Immigrant.

American Literature

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.

Believe In Your Own Eyes And You'll Get Into A Lot Of Trouble, Hot Water, A Mess.

Islam Doesn't Have To Mean Blind Faith. It Can Mean What It Always Meant In Your Family, A Culture, A Civilization, As Open-minded As Your Grandfather Was, As Delightedly Disputatious As Your Father Was.... Don't Let The Zealots Make Muslim A Terrifying Word, I Urged Myself; Remember When It Meant Family.

Sometimes I Think That When People Become Famous, There's A Public Perception That They Are Not Human Beings Any More. They Don't Have Feelings; They Don't Get Hurt; You Can Act And Say As You Like About Them.

In The Real World, Immeasurable Hurt Is Caused By Terrorists Based In Pakistan Who Attack Countries Like India.

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.

I Have Never Really Thought Of Myself As A Writer About Religion. And I Think One Of The Things That Happened To Me As A Result Of All That Is That I Think It Did For Some People, Many People, Obscure The Kind Of Writer That I Actually Am.

I Reluctantly Concluded That There Was No Way For Me To Help Bring Into Being The Muslim Culture I'd Dreamed Of, The Progressive, Irreverent, Skeptical, Argumentative, Playful And Unafraid Culture Which Is What I've Always Understood As Freedom.... Actually Existing Islam ... Which Makes Literalism A Weapon And Redescription A Crime, Will Never Let The Likes Of Me In.

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.

All Art Began As Sacred Art, You Know? I Mean, All Painting Began As Religious Painting. All Writing Began As Religious Writing.

Fundamentalists Believe That We Don't Believe In Anything. In Their View Of The World, They Are In Possession Of Absolute Certainties, While We Are Descending Into Decadence. We Will Be Able To Triumph Over Terrorism Not By Waging War On It, But Through A Conscious, Fearless Way Of Life.

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

I Grew Up Falling In Love With Kind Of Story, Amazing, Wonder Tale Of The East, Which If You're A Child Growing Up In India Is All Around You.and I Think One Of The Gifts It Gave Me As A Writer Was This Early Knowledge That Stories Are Not True.

Falling In Love

If You Give In To The Threat Of Violence, If You Give In To Bullying, What You Know Is That There Will Be More Bullying. There Will Not Be Less Bullying. If You Appease The Bully, You Make Sure That He Will Bully You Some More. Not Less. It Doesn't Solve The Problem. It Makes The Problem Worse.

I Had A Very Difficult Relationship With My Father, Which Ended Up Okay, But There Were Many Difficult Years.

Difficult Relationship

It Is Very, Very Easy Not To Be Offended By A Book. You Just Have To Shut It.

What Distinguishes A Great Artist From A Weak One Is First Their Sensibility And Tenderness; Second, Their Imagination, And Third, Their Industry.

Sometimes Writing A Novel Is Not Unlike Having A Baby. You'd Have To Ask A Female Novelist To Compare The Pain.

I Want More Than What I Want. (vina Apsara)

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.

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

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.

Everybody Loves 'the Wire,' And I Think It's Okay, But In The End It's Just A Police Series.

I Did A Lot Of Student Acting When I Was Young.

Fundamentalism Isn't About Religion, It's About Power.

The People Suffering Most From The Taliban Were Afghans.

If Bigots Behave Like Bigots, It's Not A Huge Surprise.

Matthew Wiener On Mad Men Writes The Entire Series Before They Start Shooting, And If You Have That, Then What You Can Do With Character And Story Is Not At All Unlike What You Can Do In A Novel.

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.

The Problem's Name Is God.

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

The Sixty-minute Drama Form Has Become Very Rich.

Unfortunately, The Problem Of The Free Speech Argument Is That You Have To Defend People You Can't Stand.

I Used To Say, 'there Is A God-shaped Hole In Me.' For A Long Time I Stressed The Absence, The Hole. Now I Find It Is The Shape Which Has Become More Important.

What I Worry About And Don't Like Is The Way In Which The Ideology Of Multiculturalism Has Declined Into Cultural Relativism. I Think That's Very Dangerous. When The Archbishop Of Canterbury, For God's Sake, Says That You Can't Have One Law For Everybody... That's Stupid.

I Will Come Back To India - So Deal With It.

There Was A Series Called 'game Of Thrones' Which Was Very Popular Here In The United States, A Post-tolkien Kind Of Thing. It Was Garbage, Yet Very Addictive Garbage - Because There's Lots Of Violence, All The Women Take Their Clothes Off All The Time, And It's Kind Of Fun.

No, I Don't Think It's Fair To Label Islam 'violent.' But I Will Say That To My Knowledge, No Writer Has Ever Gone Into Hiding For Criticizing The Amish.

Faith Without Doubt Is Addiction

Before I Came To England, My Favorite Authors Were P. G. Wodehouse And Agatha Christie. I Used To Devour Both.

A Book Is A Version Of The World. If You Do Not Like It, Ignore It; Or Offer Your Own Version In Return.

We All Owe Death A Life.

In An Ideal World, You Could Reunite The Pakistan-occupied Part Of Kashmir With The Indian-occupied Part And Restore The Old Borders. You Could Have Both India And Pakistan Agreeing To Guarantee Those Borders, Demilitarise The Area, And To Invest In It Economically. In A Sane World That Would Happen, But We Don't Live In A Sane World.

India And Pakistan

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.

English, No Longer An English Language, Now Grows From Many Roots.

English Language

I'm A World Expert On Superhero Comics. I Think Maybe Only Michael Chabon Knows More Than Me.

In Our Time, We Have Become Too Interested In The Artist And His Or Her Character And Experience As A Way Of Understanding Art. In My View, You Should Be Able To Read A Book Or See A Film Without Knowing A Single Thing About Conditions Or Circumstances Or Character Of The Artist, And Experience The Work To The Full Without Such Information. Sometimes I Feel - Speaking For Myself - That People Know Much Too Much About Me, And I Wish People Knew Less And Could Just Read These Books And Respond To Them Purely As Words On A Page.

Perhaps Because My Relationship With My Father Went Through Such A Long, Bumpy Time, It's Been Very Important For Me To Work To Try To Keep Lines Of Communication Open Between My Sons And Myself To Try To Avoid My Father's Mistakes. At Least If You're Making Mistakes, Make Different Mistakes.

It Seems To Me It's Perfectly Possible To Vehemently Disagree With A Piece Of Work And To Say That It's Offensive And Insulting And So On And So On. And You're Absolutely Entitled To Do That And To Speak Back, If You Like, Against That Piece Of Speech With All The Vehemence At Your Disposal. I Mean, That's Legitimate. Even Other Things. People Have A Right To Demonstrate.

...the Lesson [comic Books] Taught Children- Or This Child, At Any Rate- Was Perhaps The Unintentionally Radical Truth That Exceptionality Was The Greatest And Most Heroic Of Values; That Those Who Were Unlike The Crowd Were To Be Treasured The Most Lovingly; And That This Exceptionality Was A Treasure So Great That It Had To Be Concealed, In Ordinary Life, Beneath What The Comic Books Called A 'secret Identity'.

Secret Identity

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.

Everest Silences You...when You Come Down, Nothing Seems Worth Saying, Nothing At All. You Find The Nothingness Wrapping You Up, Like A Sound. Non-being. You Can't Keep It Up, Of Course. The World Rushes In Soon Enough. What Shuts You Up Is, I Think, The Sight You've Had Of Perfection: Why Speak If You Can't Manage Perfect Thoughts, Perfect Sentences? It Feels Like A Betrayal Of What You've Been Through. But It Fades; You Accept That Certain Compromises, Closures, Are Required If You're To Continue.

Both John F. Kennedy And Nelson Mandela Use The Same Three-word Phrase Which In My Mind Says It All, Which Is ‘freedom Is Indivisible. You Can’t Slice It Up, Otherwise It Ceases To Be Freedom. You Can Dislike Charlie Hebdo … But The Fact That You Dislike Them Has Nothing To Do With Their Right To Speak.

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