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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.

-Salman Rushdie

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I Always Thought Storytelling

Salman Rushdie

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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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I Grew Up Kissing Books And Bread.

If By Some Bizarre Chance There Turns Out To Be A God [...], I'm Willing To Bet He's An Atheist Too.

The West Should Be Tougher On Pakistan. It Is Trying To Play Both Ends Against The Middle - To Look Like The Friend Of The Revolutionaries On The One Hand And A Friend Of The West In The Fight Against Terrorism. It Can't Be Both Things.

I've Always Thought That One Of The Things That The Internet And The Gaming World Permits As A Narrative Technique Is To Not Tell The Story From Beginning To End - To Tell Stories Sideways, To Give Alternative Possibilities That The Reader Can, In A Way, Choose Between.

One Of The Things I've Learnt Is Not To Depend On There Being A Woman In Your Life To Make It Work. I Love My Work, I Love My Children, I've Got Wonderful Friends, You Know, I Have A Nice Life.

Wonderful Friends

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.

‘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.

When We Stop Believing In The Gods We Can Start Believing In Their Stories.

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.

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

Free Speech Is Life Itself.

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

I Do Not Need The Idea Of God To Explain The World I Live In.

Discovery Is Fun. I Am Incredibly Open To Everything.

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

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.

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

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

...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

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.

Where There Is No Belief, There Is No Blasphemy.

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.

The Time-honored Role Of The Artist [is] To Speak Truth To Power.

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.

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

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.

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.

You Never Know The Answers To The Questions Of Life Until You Are Asked.

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.

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.

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

This Is Going To Make Me Sound Ancient, But I Remember Juhu Beach When There Weren't Any Buildings On It. You'd Go Through Countryside And Arrive At This Amazing Beach. I Remember Driving From Delhi To The Qutab Minar Through Countryside. Mehrauli Was A Little Village - That's All Gone.

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.

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.

But Love Is What We Want, Not Freedom. Who Then Is The Unluckier Man? The Beloved, Who Is Given His Heart's Desire And Must For Ever After Fear Its Loss, Or The Free Man, With His Unlooked-for Liberty, Naked And Alone Between The Captive Armies Of The Earth?

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

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.

People Are Always Telling Me That They've Seen People Reading My Books On The Subway, Or The Beach, Or Whenever.

At The Height Of The British Empire Very Few English Novels Were Written That Dealt With British Power. It's Extraordinary That At The Moment In Which England Was The Global Superpower The Subject Of British Power Appeared Not To Interest Most Writers.

The Problem's Name Is God.

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.

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

When You Write, You Write Out Of Your Best Self. Everything Else Drops Away.

Between The Adored And The Adorer Falls The Shadow.

Sometimes You Find Your Voice By Trying To Write Like People, And Sometimes You Find It By Trying To Write Unlike People.

My Father Decided That He Was Such A Admirer Of Ibn Rushd's Philosophy, Thinking That He Changed The Family Name To Rushdie. I Realized Why My Father Was So Interested In Him, Because He Was Really An Incredibly Modernizing Voice Inside Our Islamic Culture.

There Needs To Be A Thorough Examination, By Muslims Everywhere, Of Why It Is That The Faith They Love Breeds So Many Violent Mutant Strains.

One Minute You've Got A Lucky Star Watching Over You And The Next Instant It's Done A Bunk.

Wherever Goodness Lay, It Did Not Lie In Ritual, Unthinking Obeisance Before A Deity But Rather, Perhaps, In The Slow Clumsy, Error-strewn Working Out Of An Individual Or Collective Path.

The Most Obvious Inspiration To Be Brave Is That We All Feel It: You Can't Have Free Expression Right Now In A Very Wide Range Of Countries. It Takes A Lot Of Guts For Writers And Journalists In Those Countries To Stand Up Against Repression And Do What They Do. Russia Is A Case In Point Where, As You Know, Journalists Have An Embarrassing Habit Of Being Killed For Their Reporting.

Freedom To Reject Is The Only Freedom.

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

When I'm Writing Books, Something Weird Happens; And The Result Is The Books Contain A Large Amount Of What You Could Call 'supernaturalism.' As A Writer, I Find I Need That To Explain The World I'm Writing About.

Few Topographical Boundaries Can Rival The Frontiers Of The Mind.

Nothing Comes From Nothing, Thieflet; No Story Comes From Nowhere; New Stories Are Born From Old--it Is The New Combinations That Make Them New.

My Grandmother Was Very Fierce And Gruff. She Was Quite Small, But She Was Very Wide.

Names, Once They Are In Common Use, Quickly Become Mere Sounds, Their Etymology Being Buried, Like So Many Of The Earth's Marvels, Beneath The Dust Of Habit.

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

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

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.

Free Societies Are Societies In Motion, And With Motion Comes Friction.

In Spite Of All Evidence That Life Is Discontinuous, A Valley Of Rifts, And That Random Chance Plays A Great Part In Our Fates, We Go On Believing In The Continuity Of Things, In Causation And Meaning. But We Live On A Broken Mirror, And Fresh Cracks Appear In Its Surface Every Day.

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

O The Shame Of It, The Humiliating Shame Of Being Condescended To By Dolts

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.

What I've Always Tried To Find In My Books Are Points At Which The Private Lives Of The Characters, And Also My Own, Intersect With The Public Life Of The Culture.

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

But There's One Thing We Must All Be Clear About: Terrorism Is Not The Pursuit Of Legitimate Goals By Some Sort Of Illegitimate Means. Whatever The Murderers May Be Trying To Achieve, Creating A Better World Certainly Isn't One Of Their Goals. Instead They Are Out To Murder Innocent People.

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.'

We Who Have Grown Up On A Diet Of Honour And Shame Can Still Grasp What Must Seem Unthinkable To People Living In The Aftermath Of The Death Of God And Of Tragedy: That Men Will Sacrifice Their Dearest Love On The Implacable Altars Of Their Pride.

Everything Has Shape, If You Look For It. There Is No Escape From Form.

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

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.

Masks Beneath Masks Until Suddenly The Bare Bloodless Skull.

When A Reader Falls In Love With A Book, It Leaves Its Essence Inside Him, Like Radioactive Fallout In An Arable Field, And After That There Are Certain Crops That Will No Longer Grow In Him, While Other, Stranger, More Fantastic Growths May Occasionally Be Produced.

Falling In Love

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

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.

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.

I Only Met Margaret Thatcher Twice. The Thing That I Thought About Meeting Her Was How Extraordinarily Intelligent She Was. You Really Had To Be On Your Game Otherwise She'd Make Mincemeat Of You.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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?

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

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.

I Think That A Lot Of Us, Whether We Are Religious Or Not - There Are No Words To Express Some Things Except Religious Words. For Instance, 'soul.'

Bin Laden Was Born Filthy Rich And Died In A Rich Man's House, Which He Had Painstakingly Built To The Highest Specifications.

‎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.

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

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

A Relationship With An Imaginary Woman Is Preferable To A Relationship With A Real One.

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

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.

When You Start Writing About The Stuff That Is The Central Experience Of Your Own Life, You Can Talk About Whatever You Want, In Whatever Way You Want.

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

The Moment You Declare A Set Of Ideas To Be Immune From Criticism, Satire, Derision, Or Contempt, Freedom Of Thought Becomes Impossible.

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

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.

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.

If I Were Dead, Then Nobody In England Would Have To Fuss About The Cost Of My Security And Whether Or Not I Merited Such Special Treatment For So Long.

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

It Just Requires So Much Of You, And Most Of The Time You Feel Dumb.

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

Prophet Mohammed Would Have No Objection To The Satanic Verses.

You Start At The Stupid End Of The Book, And If You're Lucky You Finish At The Smart End.

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.

The Sixty-minute Drama Form Has Become Very Rich.

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.

I Determined To Make My Peace With Islam, Even At The Cost Of My Pride. Those Who Were Surprised And Displeased By What I Did Perhaps Failed To See That ... I Wanted To Make Peace Between The Warring Halves Of The World, Which Were Also The Warring Halves Of My Soul.

Don't You Know Girls Have To Fool People Every Day Of Their Lives If They Want To Get Anywhere?

I Always Thought The Front Line Was The Bookstores. And Bookstores Around America, Around The World Did Astonishingly Well. They Held The Line. They Didn't Chicken Out. You Know, They Defended The Book. They Kept It In The Front Of The Store.

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

We Are Described Into Corners, And Then We Must Describe Ourselves Out Of Corners.

The Worst, Most Insidious Effect Of Censorship Is That, In The End, It Can Deaden The Imagination Of The People. Where There Is No Debate, It Is Hard To Go On Remembering, Every Day, That There Is A Suppressed Side To Every Argument.

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.

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.

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.

I Am On Facebook, But Mainly As A Way To Spy On My Children. I Find Out More About Them From Their Facebook Pages Than From What They Tell Me.

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

Gym Motivational

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.

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 The Creative Artist Worries If He Will Still Be Free Tomorrow, Then He Will Not Be Free Today.

Have You Noticed The Physical Resemblance Between Imran Khan And Gaddafi? If You Were Making A Movie Of The Life Of Gaddafi And You Wanted A Slightly Better-looking Version Of Gaddafi, You Might Cast Imran Khan.

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

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

So India’s Problem Turns Out To Be The World’s Problem. What Happened In India Has Happened In God’s Name. The Problem’s Name Is God.

Well, We're Still In The Middle Of It. And It Doesn't Show Any Sign Of Going Away. And These Attacks That Were - That Seemed So Odd At The Time, With "satanic Verses," Because We Didn't Have Any Context For This. You Know, Where Did That Come From? It Seemed To Come Out Of Nowhere.

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

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 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.

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.

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

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.

I Would Argue That Religion Comes From A Desire To Get To The Questions Of, 'where Do We Come From?' And 'how Shall We Live?' And I Would Say I Don't Need Religion To Answer Those Questions.

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

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.

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?

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

Is Birth Always A Fall?

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

And At The End Of The Day, There Was An Attempt To Suppress A Book. The Book Wasn't Suppressed. It's Freely Available In Whatever It Is, Close To 50 Languages. There Was An Attempt To Suppress The Writer. And I'm Happy To Say The Writer Wasn't Suppressed.

The End Of The Day

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

I Hate Admitting That My Enemies Have A Point.

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

Original Thought

The Usa Approach Looks Like Bullying Because It Is.

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 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.

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

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

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

If You Want To Tell The Untold Stories, If You Want To Give Voice To The Voiceless, You've Got To Find A Language. Which Goes For Film As Well As Prose, For Documentary As Well As Autobiography. Use The Wrong Language, And You're Dumb And Blind.

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

If Woody Allen Were A Muslim, He'd Be Dead By Now.

Positive Atheism

A Novel, I Think, Is Partly About The Contemporary And Partly About The Eternal, And It's The Balance Of That That's Difficult To Achieve.

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

Nobody Wants To Read A 600 Page Book In Which The Author Is Fabulous Throughout.

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

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

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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

Even When Things Are At Their Worst, There's A Little Voice In Your Head Saying, 'good Story!'

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.

I Don't Think People Cry Reading 'midnight's Children,' But A Lot Of People Seem To Cry Watching The Movie.

The History Of Life Was Not The Bumbling Progress - The Very English, Middle-class Progress - Victorian Thought Had Wanted It To Be, But Violent, A Thing Of Dramatic, Cumulative Transformations: In The Old Formulation, More Revolution Than Evolution.

History Of Life

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

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.

When Thought Becomes Excessively Painful, Action Is The Finest Remedy.

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

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 Think People Direct Good Films When They Feel Personal To Them, Not Because It's A Famous Book Or Something. It Has To Something Move Over That And Somehow Become Personal To The Director.

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.

Thomas Pynchon Looks Exactly Like Thomas Pynchon Should Look. He Is Tall, He Wears Lumberjack Shirts And Blue Jeans. He Has Albert Einstein White Hair And Bugs Bunny Front Teeth.

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.

Why Speak If You Can't Manage Perfect Thoughts, Perfect Sentences?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

Whores And Writers, Mahound. We Are The People You Can't Forgive.

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

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.

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.

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

And So It Is They Who, Between Them, Give Me All The Reasons For Believing In None.

Only The Foolish, Blinded By Language's Conventions, Think Of Fire As Red Or Gold. Fire Is Blue At It's Melancholy Rim, Green In It's Envious Heart. It May Burn White, Or Even, In It's Greatest Rages, Black.

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."

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.

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

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Bernard Cornwell

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