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

-Salman Rushdie

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I Was 21 In

Salman Rushdie

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

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

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I Was Living In New York At The Time Of The 9/11 Attacks. And I Remember, You Know, In Those Weeks That Followed, When None Of Us Spoke About Anything Else Really, A Number Of Friends Of Mine, People I Knew, Including Very Experienced Journalists, I Heard Them Saying Things Like, Well, Now We Understand What Happened To You.

A Man Is Sane Only To The Extent That He Subscribes To A Previously-agreed Construction Of Reality.

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

In Today's Us, It's Possible For Almost Anyone - Women, Gays, African-americans, Jews - To Run For, And Be Elected To, High Office.

As A Writer, One Of The Things We All Learned From The Movies Was A Kind Of Compression That Didn't Exist Before People Were Used To Watching Films. For Instance, If You Wanted To Write A Flashback In A Novel, You Once Had To Really Contextualize It A Lot, To Set It Up. Now, Readers Know Exactly What You're Doing. Close-ups, Too.

Masks Beneath Masks Until Suddenly The Bare Bloodless Skull.

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.

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

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

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.

Life Is Lived Forward But Is Judged In Reverse.

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

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

Between The Adored And The Adorer Falls The Shadow.

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.

The Only Privilege Literature Deserves - And This Privilege It Requires In Order To Exist - Is The Privilege Of Being In The Arena Of Discourse, The Place Where The Struggle Of Our Languages Can Be Acted Out.

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Alfred De Musset

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