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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.

-Salman Rushdie

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I Have Been Only

Salman Rushdie

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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.

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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.

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In The '50s, Listening To Elvis And Others On The Radio In Bombay - It Didn't Feel Alien. Noises Made By A Truck Driver From Tupelo, Mississippi, Seemed Relevant To A Middle-class Kid Growing Up On The Other Side Of The World. That Has Always Fascinated Me.

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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 Used To Write A Monthly Column For The 'new York Times' Syndicate. But I Stopped Because I Found It Really Hard To Have One Extreme Opinion A Month. I Don't Know How These Columnists Have Two Or Three Ideas A Week; I Was Having Difficulty Having 12 Things To Say A Year.

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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.

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There Is A Point Beyond Which Conciliation Looks Like Capitulation. I Do Not Believe I Passed That Point, But Others Have Thought Otherwise.

I Had Become A Kind Of Information Magpie, Gathering To Myself All Manner Of Shiny Scraps Of Fact And Hokum And Books And Art-history And Politics And Music And Film, And Developing, Too, A Certain Skill In Manipulating And Arranging These Pitiful Shards So That They Glittered And Caught The Light. Fool's Gold, Or Priceless Nuggets Mined From My Singular Childhood's Rich Bohemian Seam? I Leave It To Others To Decide.

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

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

Writers Have Been In Terrible Situations And Have Yet Managed To Produce Extraordinary Work.

We Look Up And We Hope The Stars Look Down, We Pray That There May Be Stars For Us To Follow, Stars Moving Across The Heavens And Leading Us To Our Destiny, But It's Only Our Vanity. We Look At The Galaxy And Fall In Love, But The Universe Cares Less About Us Than We Do About It, And The Stars Stay In Their Courses However Much We May Wish Upon Them To Do Otherwise. It's True That If You Watch The Sky-wheel Turn For A While You'll See A Meteor Fall, Flame And Die. That's Not A Star Worth Following; It's Just An Unlucky Rock. Our Fates Are Here On Earth. There Are No Guiding Stars.

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

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.

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.

Most American Writers Don't Get Asked Their Opinion On Current Affairs, Whereas In Europe And England, We Still Do. There Are Writers Here Who Are The Most Sophisticated Commentators, But They're Not Asked. Like Don Delillo, Who Sort Of Forecast Most Of The Modern World Before It Happened.

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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Your Blasphemy, Salman, Can't Be Forgiven. To Set Your Words Against The Words Of God.

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

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

Many Men Start Being Friendly With Women Because They Are Trying To Seduce Them. I'm Not Trying To Seduce Them. I Just Like Hanging Out With Them.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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My Heart Broke Open And History Fell In.

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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.

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

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.

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

The Accidents Of My Life Have Given Me The Ability To Make Stories In Which Different Parts Of The World Are Brought Together, Sometimes Harmoniously, Sometimes In Conflict, And Sometimes Both - Usually Both. The Difficulty In These Stories Is That If You Write About Everywhere You Can End Up Writing About Nowhere.

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

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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.

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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.

Science Fiction Is Always A Vehicle For Ideas. It's The Form Which Allows Either Movies Or Books To Be An Exploration Of How We Should Live.

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.

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

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

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

I'm Definitely Post-something.

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

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.

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.

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The Sixty-minute Drama Form Has Become Very Rich.

Dissensions Between Muslim Nations Run At Least As Deep, If Not Deeper, Than Those Nations' Resentment Of The West.

My First Novel - The Novel I Wrote Before 'midnight's Children' - Feels, To Me, Now, Very - I Mean, I Get Embarrassed When I See People Reading It. You Know, There Are Some People Who, Bizarrely, Like It. Which I'm, You Know, I'm Happy For.

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If My Child Had Prejudice In His Head, I'd Be Ashamed. I Would See It As My Failure As A Parent.

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

So Thomas Pynchon Wants A Private Life And No Photographs And Nobody To Know His Home Address. I Can Dig It, I Can Relate To That (but, Like, He Should Try It When It's Compulsory Instead Of A Free-choice Option).

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

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.

Literature Is The One Place In Any Society Where, Within The Secrecy Of Our Own Heads, We Can Hear Voices Talking About Everything In Every Possible Way.

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.

In India, As Elsewhere In Our Darkening World, Religion Is The Poison In The Blood. Where Religion Intervenes, Mere Innocence Is No Excuse. Yet We Go On Skating Around This Issue, Speaking Of Religion In The Fashionable Language Of 'respect.' What Is There To Respect In Any Of This, Or In Any Of The Crimes Now Being Committed Almost Daily Around The World In Religion's Dreaded Name?

World Religions

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

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

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.

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.

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."

Thought I Was Doing Two Things. One Is Inquiring Into The Phenomenon Of Revelation, If You Are Not A Religious Person. But, Clearly, It's A Sincere Phenomenon.

...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 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.

American Literature Has Always Been Immigrant.

American Literature

Home Is The Place Where You Feel Happy.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Why Obliterate The Exceptional Merely In Order To Make The Outstanding Look Finer Than It Was?

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

Extraordinary Things

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

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

A Little Bit Of One Story Joins Onto An Idea From Another, And Hey Presto, . . . Not Old Tales But New Ones. Nothing Comes From Nothing.

Good Advice Is Rarer Than Rubies.

Doris Lessing Really Doesn't Care What The Critics Say. In Fact, She Orders Her Publishers Not To Send Her The Reviews And Gets Cross With Them If They Do Because She Doesn't Want That In Her Head. She's Going Where She's Going, And That's Where She Wants To Go.

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

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

The Publishing Of A Book Is A Worldwide Event. The Attempt To Suppress A Book Is A Worldwide Event.

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.

I Grew Up Reading 'the Jungle Books' And Loving Them.

The Liveliness Of Literature Lies In Its Exceptionality, In Being The Individual, Idiosyncratic Vision Of One Human Being, In Which, To Our Delight And Great Surprise, We May Find Our Own Vision Reflected.

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

Prophet Mohammed Would Have No Objection To The Satanic Verses.

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.

It's Kennedy's War, Vietnam. Lyndon Johnson Got All The Flak, But It's Kennedy's War.

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

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?

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.'

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.

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

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.

Books Choose Their Authors; The Act Of Creation Is Not Entirely A Rational And Conscious One.

All Names Mean Something.

I Have Been A Film Buff All My Life And Believe That The Finest Cinema Is Fully The Equal Of The Best Novels.

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

I'm A Reader Of Chinese Literature, I Like Their Films, But Also: I've Had Great Difficulty Getting My Work Published In China; Very Little Of It Has Been Published There. The First Two Attempts To Have All Of My Work Published, For Instance, Were Refused Without Any Reason Ever Being Given.

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.

Faith Without Doubt Is Addiction

I Want To Write Novels. I Want To Write Stories. I Want To Do The Stuff That I Became A Writer To Do.

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

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.

One Of The Things I Know From The Study Of History Is That History Surprises You. History Is Not Written. It's Not Inevitable.the Victory Of Evil Is Not Certain.

Now I Know What A Ghost Is. Unfinished Business, That's What.

Unfinished Business

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

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

Falling In Love

Life Is Lived Forward But Is Judged In Reverse.

What Had Been (at The Beginning) No Bigger Than A Full Stop Had Expanded Into A Comma, A Word, A Sentence, A Paragraph, A Chapter; Now It Was Bursting Into More Complex Developments, Becoming, One Might Say, A Book - Perhaps An Encylopaedia - Even A Whole Language.

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.

This Strange Business Of What It Is To Be A Writer Is This Increasingly Insane World In Which We Live, In Which Surrealism, It Seems, Is The New Realism.

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

Original Thought

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.

I Remember When I Was Young, Many Cities In The Muslim World Were Cosmopolitan Cities With A Lot Of Culture.

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

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I've Never Read Anything So Badly Written That Got Published. It Made 'twilight' Look Like 'war And Peace.'

What Happened In Pakistan Was That People Were Told: You're All Muslim, So Now You're A Country. As We Saw In 1971 With The Bangladesh Secession, The Answer To That Was: 'oh No, We're Not.'

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 Thought, You Know, I Would Probably Not Have Seen That. On The Other Hand, He's Obviously Completely Telling The Truth. So, Then What Is That? That's - I Wanted To Explore That. And Then I Wanted To Talk About How Ideas Are Born. And The Big Question That The Book Asks In A Number Of Ways About A Number Of Things Is That. How Does A New Idea Come Into The World?

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

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

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

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.

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'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.

Of Course, There Is Nothing Intrinsic Linking Any Religion With Any Act Of Violence. The Crusades Don't Prove That Christianity Was Violent. The Inquisition Doesn't Prove That Christianity Tortures People. But That Christianity Did Torture People.

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.

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.

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

When You Have Children, Your Perspective On The Parent-child Relationship Alters.

I Was Very Happy In Bombay. I Was Good At School. There Was No Reason To Change Anything. I Suppose It Must Have Been Some Spirit Of Adventure, Of Wanting To See The World.

The Point Is Always Reached After Which The Gods No Longer Share Their Lives With Mortal Men And Women, They Die Or Wither Away Or Retire... Now That They've Gone, The High Drama's Over. What Remains Is Ordinary Human Life.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

This Was An Age Before E-books. We All Knew That The Only Way You Can Allow A Book To Survive In Print In The Long Term Is In Paperback. The Hardback Has A Certain Life, And Then It Stops Having That. It Stops Selling, And If You Want The Book To Just Stay Around There Has To Be A Paperback Edition. So If There Were Not A Paperback Edition The Book Would Eventually Disappear From The Shelves, And We Would Have Lost The Battle.

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.

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.

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.

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.

You Want All Your Books To Stick Around After You've Gone.

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

A Sigh Isn't Just A Sigh. We Inhale The World And Breathe Out Meaning. While We Can. While We Can.

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

You Don't Just - You Often Have To Defend The Freedoms Of People You Don't Like, You Know, Whose Work You Don't Like, Because Freedom Of Speech Is Not Just For Serious People. It's Also For Trashy People. So, And, Unfortunately, This Is At The Trashy End Of The Scale.

Freedom Of Speech

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.

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.

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.

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

I Hate Admitting That My Enemies Have A Point.

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.

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.

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