Background Image

...

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

-Salman Rushdie

...

Please Wait....
Translating....

I Suppose Authoritarians Don't

Salman Rushdie

...

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

Views: 3

Topic

More From Salman Rushdie

Actually, I Don't Even Like Parties. I Would Much Prefer A Room With Four Friends Who Sit Around And Have Dinner. I Detest Nightclubs. And I Don't Like Places Where The Noise Is So Loud You Can't Talk To People.

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

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

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

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.

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

Difficult Relationship

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

If You Listen To The Urban Speech Patterns There You'll Find It's Quite Characteristic That A Sentence Will Begin In One Language, Go Through A Second Language And End In A Third. It's The Very Playful, Very Natural Result Of Juggling Languages. You Are Always Reaching For The Most Appropriate Phrase.

People Don't Like Being Around Despair. Our Tolerance For The Truly Hopeless, For Those Who Are Irredeemably Broken By Life Is Strictly Limited. The Sob Stories We Like Are The Ones That End Before We're Bored.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

You Don't Fight Radical Conservatism With Not-quite-so Radical Conservatism.

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

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.

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

The Thing That Always Attracted Me To New York Was The Sense Of Being In A Place Where A Lot Of People Had A Lot Of Stories Not Unlike Mine,' Rushdie Says. 'everybody Comes From Somewhere Else. Everyone's Got A Polish Grandmother, Some Kind Of Metamorphosis In Their Family Circumstances. That's A Very Big Thing - The Experience Of Not Living Where You Started.

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

The Idea Of The Sacred Is Quite Simply One Of The Most Conservative Notions In Any Culture, Because It Seeks To Turn Other Ideas - Uncertainty, Progress, Change - Into Crimes.

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.

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

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.

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.'

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.

Life Is Lived Forward But Is Judged In Reverse.

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

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

Positive Atheism

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

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

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

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

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

The Usa Approach Looks Like Bullying Because It Is.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

I Fell Victim To The Temptation Of Every Autobiographer, To The Illusion That Since The Past Exists Only In One's Memories And The Words Which Strive Vainly To Encapsulate Them, It Is Possible To Create Past Events Simply By Saying They Occurred.

When People Use The Term Magic Realism, Usually They Only Mean 'magic' And They Don't Hear 'realism', Whereas The Way In Which Magic Realism Actually Works Is For The Magic To Be Rooted In The Real. It's Both Things. It's Not Just A Fairytale Moment. It's The Surrealism That Arises Out Of The Real.

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

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.

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

Human Beings Understand Themselves And Shape Their Futures By Arguing And Challenging And Questioning And Saying The Un-sayable, Not By Bowing The Knee Whether To Gods Or To Men.

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

A Book Is Not Completed Till It's Read.

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.

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

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.

He Had Picked Up Languages The Way Most Sailors Pick Up Diseases; Languages Were His Gonorrhoea, His Syphilis, His Scurvy, His Ague, His Plague.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Cruelty Is Not A Literary Value.

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."

The Enemy For The Fanatic Is Pleasure, Which Makes It Extremely Important To Continue To Indulge In Pleasure. Dance Madly. That Is How You Get Rid Of Terrorism.

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

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.

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.

Ignorantly Is How We All Fall In Love; For It Is A Kind Of Fall. Closing Our Eyes, We Leap From That Cliff In Hope Of A Soft Landing. Nor Is It Always Soft; But Still, Without That Leap Nobody Comes To Life.

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

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

Prophet Mohammed Would Have No Objection To The Satanic Verses.

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

The World Is Full Of Things That Upset People. But Most Of Us Deal With It And Move On And Don't Try And Burn The Planet Down.

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

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

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.

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.

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?

I Think It's A Very Important Function Of Art To Challenge Accepted Reality, Especially When That Reality Is Created By Powerful Interest Groups.

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

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.

There Is No Such Thing As Perfect Security, Only Varying Levels Of Insecurity.

Whenever Someone Who Knows You Disappears, You Lose One Version Of Yourself. Yourself As You Were Seen, As You Were Judged To Be. Lover Or Enemy, Mother Or Friend, Those Who Know Us Construct Us, And Their Several Knowings Slant The Different Facets Of Our Characters Like Diamond-cutter's Tools. Each Such Loss Is A Step Leading To The Grave, Where All Versions Blend And End.

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

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.

Terror Is Glamour - Not Only, But Also. I Am Firmly Convinced That There's Something Like A Fascination With Death Among Suicide Bombers.

I Think The Business Of Writing A Great Deal Of It Is The Business Of Paying Attention To Your Characters, To The World They Live In, To The Story You Have To Tell, But Just A Kind Of Deep Attention And Out Of That If You Pay Attention Properly The Story Will Tell You What It Needs.

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

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

What Kind Of Christmas Present Would Jesus Ask Santa For?

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

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.

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

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.

There Is No Alternative To The Peaceful Coexistence Of Cultures.

Faith Without Doubt Is Addiction

Airport Security Exists To Guard Us Against Terrorist Attacks.

Airport Security

I'm Definitely Post-something.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Life Is Elsewhere. Cross Frontiers. Fly Away.

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

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.

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?

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Ideas Are Interesting To Me, And Religions Are A Place Where Ideas Have Been Very Subtly Embodied For Thousands Of Years. All Literature Started As Sacred Literature.

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).

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

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.

If The Culture Shifts, If People Think Differently About Women, The Art Will Shift, Too. You Can't Ask Art To Make Social Change. It's Not What It's For.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Moral High Ground

The Republicans Were Not Always Insane. They Might've Had Politics I Didn't Agree With, But They Weren't Always Actually Certifiable.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

Few Topographical Boundaries Can Rival The Frontiers Of The Mind.

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

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

[...] The Inevitable Triumph Of Illusion Over Reality That Was The Single Most Obvious Truth About The History Of The Human Race [...]

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Unfinished Business

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.

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

Something Was Badly Amiss With The Spiritual Life Of The Planet...too Many Demons Inside People Claiming To Believe In God.

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

‎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.

The Sixty-minute Drama Form Has Become Very Rich.

He Knew What He Knew: That The Real World Was Full Of Magic, So Magical Worlds Could Easily Be Real.

American Literature Has Always Been Immigrant.

American Literature

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Religion, A Mediaeval Form Of Unreason, When Combined With Modern Weaponry Becomes A Real Threat To Our Freedoms. This Religious Totalitarianism Has Caused A Deadly Mutation In The Heart Of Islam And We See The Tragic Consequences In Paris Today. I Stand With Charlie Hebdo, As We All Must, To Defend The Art Of Satire, Which Has Always Been A Force For Liberty And Against Tyranny, Dishonesty And Stupidity. 'respect For Religion' Has Become A Code Phrase Meaning 'fear Of Religion.' Religions, Like All Other Ideas, Deserve Criticism, Satire, And, Yes, Our Fearless Disrespect.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

Our Lives, Our Stories, Flowed Into One Another's, Were No Longer Our Own, Individual, Discrete.

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

Extraordinary Things

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

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

Gym Motivational

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

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.

In Writing 'the Satanic Verses,' I Think I Was Writing For The First Time From The Whole Of Myself. The English Part, The Indian Part. The Part Of Me That Loves London, And The Part That Longs For Bombay. And At My Typewriter, Alone, I Could Indulge This.

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

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

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

I Don't Like Books That Play To The Gallery, But I've Become More Concerned With Telling A Story As Clearly And Engagingly As I Can.

Trending Author

Langston Hughes

Category