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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.

-Salman Rushdie

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If You Were Standing

Salman Rushdie

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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.

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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.

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

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

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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.

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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.

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

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.

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

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The People Suffering Most From The Taliban Were Afghans.

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In Television, The 60-minute Series, 'the Wire' And 'mad Men' And So On, The Writer Is The Primary Creative Artist.

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My Parents Gave Me The Gift Of Irreligion, Of Growing Up Without Bothering To Ask People What Gods They Held Dear, Assuming That In Fact, Like My Parents, They Weren't Interested In Gods, And That This Uninterest Was 'normal.' You May Argue That The Gift Was A Poisoned Chalice, But Even If So, That's A Cup From Which I'd Happily Drink Again.

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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.

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

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

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

All Names Mean Something.

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

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.

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Difficult Relationship

What Kind Of Christmas Present Would Jesus Ask Santa For?

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

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

Difficult Relationship

I Am Gagged And Imprisoned. I Can't Even Speak. I Want To Kick A Football In A Park With My Son. Ordinary, Banal Life: My Impossible Dream.

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

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

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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

Faith Without Doubt Is Addiction

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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.

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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.

Prophet Mohammed Would Have No Objection To The Satanic Verses.

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

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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.

Falling In Love

I'm Not A Very Big Fan Of 'slumdog Millionaire.' I Think It's Visually Brilliant. But I Have Problems With The Story Line. I Find The Storyline Unconvincing.

Human Beings, You See, Do Absolutely Two Primary Things. We See Like And Unlike. Like Becomes, In Literature, Simile And Metaphor. Unlike Becomes Uniqueness And Difference, From Which I Believe, The Novel Is Born.

The Problem's Name Is God.

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

Throughout Human History, The Apostles Of Purity, Those Who Have Claimed To Possess A Total Explanation, Have Wrought Havoc Among Mere Mixed-up Human Beings.

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

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.

Where There Is No Belief, There Is No Blasphemy.

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

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

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.

This Paranoid Islam, Which Blames Outsider, 'infidels', For All The Ills Of Muslim Societies, And Whose Proposed Remedy Is The Closing Of Those Societies To The Rival Project Of Modernity, Is Presently The Fastest Growing Version Of Islam In The World.

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.

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.

In The End, The Thing That's Important About Free Expression Is That It's The Right From Which All Other Rights Are Derived. If You Can't Articulate Ideas And If You Can't Articulate Critiques Of Other Peoples' Ideas, Then You're Powerless. What Always Increases The Power Of An Authoritarian Regime Is Whether It Can Successfully Prevent People From Expressing Themselves.

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.

The Mistake Of The West Was To Put The Sauds On The Throne Of Saudi Arabia And Give Them Control Of The World's Oil Fortune, Which They Then Used To Propagate Wahhabi Islam.

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.

I'll Tell You What Divorce Hasn't Taught Me. It Didn't Teach Me Not To Get Married Again.

Be Sure That You Go To The Author To Get At His Meaning, Not To Find Yours.

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

I Do Have A Lot Of Time For People In My Life, And Friendship Is A Very Important Subject For Me. I Think I'm Unusual Among The Writers I Know In That Respect.

The Frustrating Part Of Being Tagged 'controversial' Is People Go Looking For Trouble Where There Isn't Any To Look For.

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.

Masks Beneath Masks Until Suddenly The Bare Bloodless Skull.

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

Difficult Questions

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.

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.

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."

Many Of Us Didn't Believe In The Image Of Bin Laden As A Wandering Old Man Of The Mountains, Living On Plants And Insects In An Inhospitable Cave Somewhere On The Porous Pakistan-afghan Border.

Free Speech Is The Whole Thing, The Whole Ball Game. Free Speech Is Life Itself.

I Do Think There Was A Period There When My Sanity Was Under Intense Pressure, And I Didn't Know What To Say Or Do Or How To Act. I Was Literally Living From Day To Day.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

I Believe In The Art Of Literature, I Believe In Freedom Of The Imagination, I Believe In The Kind Of Liberties That We Enjoy In These Lucky Countries Of The World.

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.

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.

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

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.

I'm A World Expert On Superhero Comics. I Think Maybe Only Michael Chabon Knows More Than Me.

To Understand Just One Life You Have To Swallow The World ... Do You Wonder, Then, That I Was A Heavy Child?

Language Upon A Silvered Tongue Affords Enchantment Enough.

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

Obviously, A Rigid, Blinkered, Absolutist World View Is The Easiest To Keep Hold Of, Whereas The Fluid, Uncertain, Metamorphic Picture I've Always Carried About Is Rather More Vulnerable.

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

The First Amendment Defends All Forms Of Speech Including Hate Speech, Which Is Why Groups Like Ku Klux Klan Are Allowed To Utter Their Poisonous Remarks.

I 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.

Islam Is Unusual In That It's The Only One Of The Great World Religions Which Was Born Inside Recorded History. That There's An Enormous Amount Of Factual Historical Record About The Life Of A Prophet And About Social Conditions In Arabia At That Time. So It's Possible To Look At The Origin Of Islam In A Scholarly Way.

World Religions

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

The Fact Of Being Alive Compensated For What Life Did To One.

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.

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

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.

The Sixty-minute Drama Form Has Become Very Rich.

The Glamour Of Being Forbidden Must Not Be Underestimated.

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

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Russell M. Nelson

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