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In Any Authoritarian Society, The Possessor Of Power Dictates, And If You Try And Step Outside, He Will Come After You. This Is Equally True Of Sovietism, Of China And Of Iran, And In Our Time It Has Happened A Lot In Islam. The Point Is That It's Worse When The Authoritarianism Is Supported By Something Supernatural.

-Salman Rushdie

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In Any Authoritarian Society,

Salman Rushdie

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In Any Authoritarian Society, The Possessor Of Power Dictates, And If You Try And Step Outside, He Will Come After You. This Is Equally True Of Sovietism, Of China And Of Iran, And In Our Time It Has Happened A Lot In Islam. The Point Is That It's Worse When The Authoritarianism Is Supported By Something Supernatural.

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So When I Studied History At Cambridge, I Did A Special Subject In That, Exactly That. And Then Actually That - While I Was Studying It Was Where I Came Across The So-called Incident Of The Satanic Verses.

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

In This World Without Quiet Corners, There Can Be No Easy Escapes From History, From Hullabaloo, From Terrible, Unquiet Fuss.

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

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With Death Comes Honesty.

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

I Am Clearly Vulnerable To These More Passionate And Volatile Unstable Relationships. I Am Trying To Not Be So Vulnerable.

Hell Is Other People's Fantasies.

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My Children Are English, And Both Of Their Mothers Were English.

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.

Censorship Is The Thing That Stops You Doing What You Want To Do, And What Writers Want To Talk About Is What They Do, Not What Stops Them Doing It.

Doing What You Want

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.

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

The End Of The Day

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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.'

One Of The Strange Things About Violent And Authoritarian Regimes Is They Don't Like The Glare Of Negative Publicity. If You Can Make Them Sufficiently Uncomfortable, They Frequently Respond By Doing What You Need Them To Do In The Spirit Of Setting People Free Or Ceasing Arrests.

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

Everybody Loves 'the Wire,' And I Think It's Okay, But In The End It's Just A Police Series.

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.

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.

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

I Don't Think I've Ever Quite Grown Out Of It, Actually. There Was A Point Where I Could Recite Some Of Those Elvish Verses - Which I've Mercifully Forgotten. But I Can Still, If Really Pushed, Recite The Text Of The Inside Of The Ruling Ring In The Language Of Mordor.

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It's Fun To Read Things When You Don't Know All The Words. Even Children Love It... They Come Up Against Weird Words, And The Weird Words Excite Them.

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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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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.

American Literature Has Always Been Immigrant.

American Literature

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

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

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.

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 Difference Between Memoir And Autobiography, As Far As I See It, Is That A Memoir Is There Primarily To Tell One Particular Story, Whereas An Autobiography Tries To Be A Full Account Of A Life.

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.

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.

Stories In Families Are Colossally Important. Every Family Has Stories: Some Funny, Some Proud, Some Embarrassing, Some Shameful. Knowing Them Is Proof Of Belonging To The Family.

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

The World, Somebody Wrote, Is The Place We Prove Real By Dying In It.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

Extraordinary Things

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

We Must Agree On What Matters: Kissing In Public Places, Bacon Sandwiches, Disagreement, Cutting-edge Fashion, Literature, Generosity, Water, A More Equitable Distribution Of The World's Resources, Movies, Music, Freedom Of Thought, Beauty, Love.

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

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.

War Used To Be Something You Could Stand On The Nearby Hill And Watch. Now We Have Total War; Everybody's In It. We Have Total Economics As Well. Everything Affects Everybody. The Malaysian Currency Shakes, And People Around The World Are Seriously Affected.

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