Background Image

...

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

...

Please Wait....
Translating....

Five Mysteries Hold The

Salman Rushdie

...

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.

Views: 4

Topic

More From Salman Rushdie

Shame Is Like Everything Else; Live With It For Long Enough And It Becomes Part Of The Furniture.

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

Discovery Is Fun. I Am Incredibly Open To Everything.

Having Been Borne Across The World, We Are Translated Men. It Is Normally Supposed That Something Always Gets Lost In Translation; I Cling, Obstinately, To The Notion That Something Can Also Be Gained.

Memory Has Its Own Special Kind. It Selects, Eliminates, Alters, Exaggerates, Minimizes, Glorifies, And Vilifies Also; But In The End It Creates Its Own Reality, Its Heterogeneous But Usually Coherent Version Of Events; And No Sane Human Being Ever Trusts Someone Else's Version More Than His Own.

We Have Seen Many Other Not Just Writers And Intellectuals, But Including Writers And Intellectuals In The Muslim World Being Attacked And Murdered By Islamic Fanatics, Accused Of Exactly The Same Things That I Was, These Medieval Crimes Of Apostasy And Heresy, But Then Broadening From That Into A Broader Attack On All Of Us.

Sometimes People Have Said That Islam, In Its Own Calendar, Is Still Only In The Middle Ages.

We All Owe Death A Life.

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

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

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

What Can't Be Cured Must Be Endured.

From The Beginning Men Used God To Justify The Unjustifiable.

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.

We Crave Permission Openly To Become Our Secret Selves.

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

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.

We Are The Only Animals That Tell Stories To Understand The World We Live In.

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?

...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.

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.

There's Going To Be No More Compromise On Issues Where There Should Not Be Compromise. Enough With Appeasement Or Apology And Mollifying, All That. To Hell With All That. I'm Just Going To Fight My Corner.

‎no People Whose Word For 'yesterday' Is The Same As Their Word For 'tomorrow' Can Be Said To Have A Firm Grip On The Time.

I Saw Quentin Tarantino's 'django Unchained,' And You Could Say A Lot Of Things Against It, But It Was Incredible Fun. I Don't Like Blood And Gore And I Am Very Squeamish About Violence, But Tarantino's Violence Is Actually Funny.

Literature Is Where I Go To Explore The Highest And Lowest Places In Human Society And In The Human Spirit, Where I Hope To Find Not Absolute Truth But The Truth Of The Tale, Of The Imagination And Of The Heart.

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

Sometimes When You Finish A Book, You Don't Know Quite What You've Got.

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

If Somebody's Trying To Shut You Up, Sing Louder, And If Possible, Better.

The West Sees Iran As An Important Force In The Gulf.

We Must Agree On What Matters: Kissing In Public Places, Bacon Sandwiches, Disagreement, Cutting-edge Fashion, Literature, Generosity, Water, A More Equitable Distribution Of The World's Resources, Movies, Music, Freedom Of Thought, Beauty, Love.

A Photograph Is A Moral Decision Taken In One Eighth Of A Second.

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

Extraordinary Things

The Thing I Really Like About Twitter Is The Speed With Which Information Reaches Me. You Find Out Things From Twitter Long Before They're On The News. That I Think Is Valuable. In Terms Of Actually Tweeting Myself, I Have Just Lost Enthusiasm For It. Maybe I'll Do Some Of It This Week To Tell People About The Pen Festival And Encourage Them To Show Up.

A Book Is A Product Of A Pact With The Devil That Inverts The Faustian Contract, He'd Told Allie. Dr Faustus Sacrificed Eternity In Return For Two Dozen Years Of Power; The Writer Agrees To The Ruination Of His Life, And Gains (but Only If He's Lucky) Maybe Not Eternity, But Posterity, At Least. Either Way (this Was Jumpy's Point) It's The Devil Who Wins.

No Story Comes From Nowhere; New Stories Are Born From Old.

Children Are The Vessels Into Which Adults Pour Their Poison.

The Thing That I Think Was Very Brave Of My Younger Self Was That He Decided He Would Be An Idiot. Just Persevere. That Feels Brave To Me: Deciding That I'm Going To Damn Well Be This Person That I've Set My Heart On Being.

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

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

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

How Do You Defeat Terrorism? Don’t Be Terrorized.

We Live In An Age Where The Rate Of Change Has Been Colossal. Colossal. Almost Every Week There's Some Transformation Of Some Kind, Whether Technological Or Political Or Scientific, Whatever. And I Think It's Bewildering To Human Beings To Live In A Time When They Can't Take Anything As Fixed - When Everything Is Shifting And Changing All The Time.

I Hate Admitting That My Enemies Have A Point.

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 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.

The Whole Story Of Migration And What That Has Done In Interconnecting The Planet Is Obviously Something I've Written About A Lot.

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?

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.

There Are Two Things In Indian History - One Is The Incredible Optimism And Potential Of The Place, And The Other Is The Betrayal Of That Potential - For Example, Corruption. Those Two Strands Intertwine Through The Whole Of Indian History, And Maybe Not Just Indian History.

If You're Going To Write A Memoir, Try To Be As Honest And Open As You Can.

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

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.

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.

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

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

If I Had Simply Wanted To Trade On An Insult To Islam, I Could Have Done It In A Sentence Rather Than Writing A 250,000-word Novel, A Work Of Fiction.

I Have A General Feeling That Writers And Artists Who Are In This Peculiar Situation, Of Being A Persecuted Artist, All Anyone Ever Asks About Is The Persecution. It May Well Be That's The Last Thing In The World They Want To Talk About. There Were Many Years In Which Every Journalist In The World Wanted To Talk To Me, But Nobody Wanted To Talk To Me About My Work. That Felt Deeply Frustrating Because I Felt There Was An Attempt To Stifle Me As An Artist. The Best Revenge I Could Have Was To Write.

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

I Know Who I Am, I Know What I'm For, And I Know What I'm Willing To Fight For.

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

We All Dream Things Into Being; You Imagine Yourself Having A Child, And Then You Have A Child. An Inventor Will Think Of Something In His Mind And Then Make It Actual. So Things Are Often Passing From The Imagined Realm Into The Real World.

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.

Reality Is A Question Of Perspective; The Further You Get From The Past, The More Concrete And Plausible It Seems - But As You Approach The Present, It Inevitably Seems More And More Incredible.

Things, Even People Have A Way Of Leaking Into Each Other Like Flavours When You Cook.

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

In Iran, Fundamentalism Was Fuelled To An Extent By The Regime Of The Shah Being Supported By The West.

Games Sometimes Require Lateral Thinking. They Sometimes Require Quite Skilled Hand-eye Coordination And So On. But They're Not In Any Sense Intelligent In The Way That You Want Your Children To Develop Intelligence To Make The Mind Not Just Supple, But Actually Informed.

American Literature Has Always Been Immigrant.

American Literature

The Interesting Thing About History Sometimes. Is That You Know These People Existed, And You Knew What Jobs They Did, But You Don't Know Much About Them As People, So You Actually Have To Make Them Up.

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

It Is Literature Which For Me Opened The Mysterious And Decisive Doors Of Imagination And Understanding. To See The Way Others See. To Think The Way Others Think. And Above All, To Feel.

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

A Poet's Work Is To Name The Unnameable, To Point At Frauds, To Take Sides, Start Arguments, Shape The World, And Stop It Going To Sleep.

I'm Not Saying I Am Never Going To Fall In Love Again, But There Is No Need To Marry.

Falling In Love

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.

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 Was 21 In 1968, So I'm As Much A Child Of The '60s As Is Possible To Be. In Those Years The Subject Of Religion Had Really Almost Disappeared; The Idea That Religion Was Going To Be A Major Force In The Life Of Our Societies, In The West Anyway, Would Have Seemed Absurd In 1968.

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.

Those Who Do Not Have Power Over The Story That Dominates Their Lives, Power To Retell It, To Rethink It, Deconstruct It, Joke About It, And Change It As Times Change, Truly Are Powerless, Because They Cannot Think New Thoughts.

The Usa Approach Looks Like Bullying Because It Is.

Pakistan Is Alarmed By The Rising Indian Influence In Afghanistan, And Fears That An Afghanistan Cleansed Of The Taliban Would Be An Indian Client State, Thus Sandwiching Pakistan Between Two Hostile Countries. The Paranoia Of Pakistan About India's Supposed Dark Machinations Should Never Be Underestimated.

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

Airport Security Exists To Guard Us Against Terrorist Attacks.

Airport Security

The Miniatures Of The Mughal Period Are Really The Pinnacle Of Indian Artistic Achievement. And Not A Single One Of Those Paintings Is Done By An Individual Artist.

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.

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 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.

Free Speech Is Life Itself.

The Sixty-minute Drama Form Has Become Very Rich.

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.

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.

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.

Hell Is Other People's Fantasies.

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

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.

Friendships Are The Family We Make - Not The One We Inherit. I've Always Been Someone To Whom Friendship, Elective Affinities, Is As Important As Family.

Stories In Families Are Colossally Important. Every Family Has Stories: Some Funny, Some Proud, Some Embarrassing, Some Shameful. Knowing Them Is Proof Of Belonging To The Family.

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.

Vulnerability Of Artists Is Definitely What Makes Organizations Like Pen Necessary Because, As I Tried To Argue, The Actual Work That Writers And Artists Do Has An Ornery Way Of Surviving. Particularly In This Age Of The Internet, It Is Very Easy For Forbidden Work To Be Found Online Somewhere If You Know Where To Look. Artists Themselves, However, Are In Increasing Danger, And Not Just Artists. The Great Concern Is That Year After Year, Rising Numbers Of Journalists Are Being Killed In Pursuit Of Their Work.

It's Fun To Read Things When You Don't Know All The Words. Even Children Love It... They Come Up Against Weird Words, And The Weird Words Excite Them.

In A Novel, If You're Any Good, You Don't Just Have Good People Or Bad People. You Have Complicated People. You Have Real People.

Captain Ahab Drowned, He Reminded Himself; It Was The Trimmer, Ishmael, Who Survived.

If You Were Standing Next To The Prophet On The Mountain, Would You Have Seen The Archangel? And My Answer To That Was Probably Not, Even Though It's Supposed To Be A Really Big Archangel. He Describes It As - The Archangel Gabriel As Standing On The Horizon And Filling The Sky. That's A Big Angel.

But I - And I Just Think It's Very - One Of The Problems Of Defending The Extraordinary Principle Of Freedom Of Speech Is That You Have To Defend Freedom Of Speech For People Like That Too.

Freedom Of Speech

A People That Has Remained Convinced Of Its Greatness And Invulnerability, That Has Chosen To Believe Such A Myth In The Face Of All The Evidence, Is A People In The Grip Of A Kind Of Sleep, Or Madness.

If Islam Is To Be Reconciled With Modernity, These Voices Must Be Encouraged Until They Swell Into A Roar.

The Only Way To Find Out Why Someone Decides To Engage In Armed Combat Is To Look At Their Individual Personality.

To Respect Louis Farrakhan, We Must Understand, Is Simply To Agree With Him... If Dissent Is Now Also To Be Thought Of As A Form Of 'dissing,' Then We Have Indeed Succumbed To The Thought Police.

Killing People Because You Don't Like Their Ideas - It's A Bad Thing.

If You Want To Draw People Into The Story, You Really Have To Write As If You're Writing A Novel And Make These Actually-existing People, Including The Actually-existing Person With My Name, Into A Believable Person On The Page. And That Requires Distance. That Requires Not Being Right Up Against The Events You're Talking About.

I've Been Fascinated By Machiavelli Since I Was Very Young. I've Always Felt That He Had A Bad Rap From History, And That He Was Actually A Person Quite Unlike What We Now Think Of As Machiavellian. He Was A Republican. He Disliked Totalitarian Government.

I've Never Seen Anywhere In The World As Beautiful As Kashmir. It Has Something To Do With The Fact That The Valley Is Very Small And The Mountains Are Very Big, So You Have This Miniature Countryside Surrounded By The Himalayas, And It's Just Spectacular. And It's True, The People Are Very Beautiful Too.

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.

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.

Sometimes Legends Make Reality, And Become More Useful Than The Facts.

If You're On A Freeway And Want To Know If You're Being Followed, What You Do Is Enormously Vary Your Speed. You Accelerate To 100 And Slow Down To 30 And Then Accelerate Again. In A City, You Make A Lot Of Turns Against The Stream Of Traffic. You Go Around A Roundabout Twice.

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

Live On, Survive, For The Earth Gives Forth Wonders. It May Swallow Your Heart, But The Wonders Keep On Coming. You Stand Before Them Bareheaded, Shriven. What Is Expected Of You Is Attention.

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.

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

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.

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.

Where There Is No Belief, There Is No Blasphemy.

Not Even The Visionary Or Mystical Experience Ever Lasts Very Long. It Is For Art To Capture That Experience, To Offer It To, In The Case Of Literature, Its Readers; To Be, For A Secular, Materialist Culture, Some Sort Of Replacement For What The Love Of God Offers In The World Of Faith.

Mystical Experiences

India, The New Myth--a Collective Fiction In Which Anything Was Possible, A Fable Rivalled Only By The Two Other Mighty Fantasies: Money And God.

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.

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?

The Glamour Of Being Forbidden Must Not Be Underestimated.

When We Stop Believing In Gods We Can Start Believing In Their Stories, I Retort. There Are Of Course No Such Things As Miracles, But If There Were And So Tomorrow We Woke Up To Find No More Believers On Earth, No More Devout Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Jews, Why Then, Sure The Beauty Of The Stories Would Be A Thing We Could Focus On Because They Wouldn't Be Dangerous Any More, They Would Become Capable Of Compelling The Only Belief That Leads To Truth, That Is, The Willing, Disbelieving Of The Reader In A Well-told Tale.

God, Satan, Paradise, And Hell All Vanished One Day In My Fifteenth Year, When I Quite Abruptly Lost My Faith. ... And Afterwards, To Prove My New-found Atheism, I Bought Myself A Rather Tasteless Ham Sandwich, And So Partook For The First Time Of The Forbidden Flesh Of The Swine. No Thunderbolt Arrived To Strike Me Down. ... From That Day To This I Have Thought Of Myself As A Wholly Secular Person.

I Seem To Have Fallen For Women With Missing Parents. Goodness Knows What It Signifies.

One Of The Things I've Thought About 'midnight's Children' Is That It Is A Novel Which Puts A Muslim Family At The Centre Of The Indian Experience.

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

Religion Is Responsible For A Lot Of The Problems In The History Of The World And It's Not Something That I Practice Or Recommend, But To Each His Own.

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

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.

The Acceptance That All That Is Solid Has Melted Into The Air, That Reality And Morality Are Not Givens But Imperfect Human Constructs, Is The Point From Which Fiction Begins.

Free Speech Is Not Just Free Speech For People You Admire. It's Also For People Who You Think Of As Reprehensible.

Make As Much Racket As You Like People. Noise Is Life And An Excess Of Noise Is A Sign That Life Is Good. There Will Be Time For Us All To Be Quiet When We Are Safely Dead.

Masks Beneath Masks Until Suddenly The Bare Bloodless Skull.

Sometimes People Have Said That Islam, In Its Own Calendar, Is Still Only In The Middle Ages. It's Still In The Fifteenth Century Or Whatever. And Christianity In The Fifteenth Century, After All, Was Full Of Inquisitions And Burnings At The Stake, And So On And So On. So Give Islam Time, And It Will Reach The Point Of Maturity That Other Religions Have. But Mormonism Is Much Younger Than Islam, And It's Got There Already. So I Don't Think That's An Argument That Works.

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.

I Am Clearly Vulnerable To These More Passionate And Volatile Unstable Relationships. I Am Trying To Not Be So Vulnerable.

There Is No Magic On Earth Strong Enough To Wipe Out The Legacies Of One's Parents.

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.

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

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."

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

Reality Is A Question Of Perspective.

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.

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

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.

Such Is The Miraculous Nature Of The Future Of Exiles: What Is First Uttered In The Impotence Of An Overheated Apartment Becomes The Fate Of Nations.

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.

I'm No Friend Of Tony Blair's And I Consider The Middle East Policies Of The United States And The Uk Fatal.

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

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?

The Christian Coalition Is Still About Christianity, Even If It's An Idea Of Christianity That Many Christians Might Not Go Along With.

I Do Not Read The Works Of Salman Rushdie, I Write Them. By The Time I Have Finished Writing Them All I Can Think Of Is Never Reading Them Again. It's So Deep, Your Involvement With A Book, That Once It's Finished, Then You Are Really Done With It.

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.

In General, Writers Shouldn't Be Killed For What They Write, Though I Can Think Of Exceptions.

I Can Walk Into A Bookshop And Point Out A Number Of Books That I Find Very Unattractive In What They Say. But It Doesn't Occur To Me To Burn The Bookshop Down. If You Don't Like A Book, Read Another Book. If You Start Reading A Book And You Decide You Don't Like It, Nobody Is Telling You To Finish It.

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

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

Gym Motivational

I'm A Novelist. Fortunately I Don't Have To Rule The World.

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.

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

There Are Things You Break That Can't Be Put Back Together Again. And Kashmir May Be One Of Them.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

I Think That England Made A Very Big, Historical Mistake To Allow Itself To Become The Kind Of Terrorist Capital Of The World.

The Pen/barbara Goldsmith Freedom To Write Award Is A Way Of Spotlighting Individual Cases. If You Look At The History Of The Award, The Freedom Rate Is Very High: A Very High Percentage Of People Who Receive Those Awards Are Freed In The Next Six Months To A Year. The Only Weapon There Is Attention, But Interestingly It Works.

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

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

It's True That The Human Body Is More Vulnerable Than The Products Of The Human Mind. We Need To Protect Artists And Journalists People To Allow Them To Work.

If You Look At Indian Movies, Every Time They Wanted An Exotic Locale, They Would Have A Dance Number In Kashmir. Kashmir Was India's Fairyland. Indians Went There Because In A Hot Country You Go To A Cold Place. People Would Be Entranced By The Sight Of Snow.

I'd Wanted To Create A Storm So That I Could Become More Famous And Richer.

One Of The Things A Writer Is For Is To Say The Unsayable, Speak The Unspeakable And Ask Difficult Questions.

Difficult Questions

Language Is Courage: The Ability To Conceive A Thought, To Speak It, And By Doing So To Make It True.

My Friend Lou Reed Came To The End Of His Song. So Very Sad.but Hey, Lou, You'll Always Take A Walk On The Wild Side. Always A Perfect Day.

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

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.

Rock And Roll Music - The Music Of Freedom Frightens People And Unleashes All Manner Of Conservative Defense Mechanisms.

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

What I Do Think Is Evident Is That Those Countries In The World Where Islamic Extremism Has Recovered The Most Power, Those Are Also The Countries Which Are Most Disliked.

Mo Yan Is The Chinese Equivalent Of The Soviet Russian Apparatchik Writer Mikhail Sholokhov: A Patsy Of The Regime.

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.

The Koran Was Revealed At A Time Of Great Change In The Arab World, The Seventh-century Shift From A Matriarchal Nomadic Culture To An Urban Patriarchal System.

The World Is About The Way In Which Our Dreams Intersect With Our Real Life. Endlessly, The World Of The Imagination Changes The World.

The Beautiful Came To This City [hollywood] In Huge Pathetic Herds, To Suffer, To Be Humiliated, To See The Powerful Currency Of Their Beauty Devalued Like The Russian Ruble Or Argentine Peso;to Work As Bellhops, As Bar Hostesses, As Garbage Collectors, As Maids. The City Was A Cliff And They Were Its Stampeding Lemmings. At The Foot Of The Cliff Was The Valley Of The Broken Dolls.

When You Throw Everything Up In The Air Anything Becomes Possible.

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.

Trending Author

Gilbert Gottfried

Chester Bennington

Category