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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.

-Salman Rushdie

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In Spite Of All

Salman Rushdie

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

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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.

It's One Thing To Say, 'i Don't Like What You Said To Me And I Find It Rude And Offensive,' But The Moment You Threaten Violence In Return, You've Taken It To Another Level, Where You Lose Whatever Credibility You Had.

If There Is A Choice Between Absolute Safety And Freedom, Then Freedom Must Always Prevail.

What Grows Best In The Heat: Fantasy; Unreason; Lust.

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

Fundamentalists Believe That We Don't Believe In Anything. In Their View Of The World, They Are In Possession Of Absolute Certainties, While We Are Descending Into Decadence. We Will Be Able To Triumph Over Terrorism Not By Waging War On It, But Through A Conscious, Fearless Way Of Life.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

If You're Going To Write A Memoir, Try To Be As Honest And Open As You Can.

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.

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).

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.

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

My Heart Broke Open And History Fell In.

It's So Disappointing, To Put It Mildly, That People Know So Much About My Life. Because It Means That They're Always Trying To Look At My Books In Terms Of My Life.

There Is A Widespread Difficulty In The Muslim World, Which Has To Do With How The People Are Taught About Examining Their Own History. A Whole Range Of Stuff Has Been Placed Off Limits.

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.'

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?

Cruelty Is Not A Literary Value.

The Thing That I Think Was Very Brave Of My Younger Self Was That He Decided He Would Be An Idiot. Just Persevere. That Feels Brave To Me: Deciding That I'm Going To Damn Well Be This Person That I've Set My Heart On Being.

The Desire For Story Is Very, Very Deep In Human Beings. We Are The Only Creature In The World That Does This; We Are The Only Creature That Tells Stories, And Sometimes Those Are True Stories And Sometimes Those Are Made Up Stories. Then There Are The Larger Stories, The Grand Narratives That We Live In, Which Are Things Like Nation And Family And Clan And So On. Those Stories Are Considered To Be Treated Reverentially. They Need To Be Part Of The Way In Which We Conduct The Discourse Of Our Lives And To Prevent People From Doing Something Very Damaging To Human Nature.

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

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.

You Start At The Stupid End Of The Book, And If You're Lucky You Finish At The Smart End.

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.

Don't You Know Girls Have To Fool People Every Day Of Their Lives If They Want To Get Anywhere?

After A Long, Hopeless War, People Will Settle For Peace, At Almost Any Price.

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.

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.

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.

In An Ideal World, You Could Reunite The Pakistan-occupied Part Of Kashmir With The Indian-occupied Part And Restore The Old Borders. You Could Have Both India And Pakistan Agreeing To Guarantee Those Borders, Demilitarise The Area, And To Invest In It Economically. In A Sane World That Would Happen, But We Don't Live In A Sane World.

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

Five Mysteries Hold The Keys To The Unseen: The Act Of Love, And The Birth Of A Baby, And The Contemplation Of Great Art, And Being In The Presence Of Death Or Disaster, And Hearing The Human Voice Lifted In Song.

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

If You Want To Tell The Untold Stories, If You Want To Give Voice To The Voiceless, You've Got To Find A Language. Which Goes For Film As Well As Prose, For Documentary As Well As Autobiography. Use The Wrong Language, And You're Dumb And Blind.

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

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

The Response Of Anybody Interested In Liberty Is That We All Have A Say And The Ability To Have An Argument Is Exactly What Liberty Is, Even Though It May Never Be Resolved. In Any Authoritarian Society The Possessor Of Power Dictates, And If You Try And Step Outside He Will Come After You.

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

An Attack Upon Our Ability To Tell Stories Is Not Just Censorship - It Is A Crime Against Our Nature As Human Beings.

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.

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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.

We Cannot Allow Religious Hooligans To Place Limiting Points On Thought.

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.

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.'

Nothing Comes From Nothing, Thieflet; No Story Comes From Nowhere; New Stories Are Born From Old--it Is The New Combinations That Make Them New.

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

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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.

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

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.

The Christian Coalition Is Still About Christianity, Even If It's An Idea Of Christianity That Many Christians Might Not Go Along With.

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.

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.

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A Figure Of Speech Is A Shifty Thing; It Can Be Twisted Or It Can Be Straight.

Some People Are Paralyzed By The Consciousness Of Death, Other People Live With It.... The Fatwa Certainly Made Me Think About It A Lot More Than I Ever Had. I Guess I Know I'm Going To Die, But Then, So Are You.

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

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

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

I've Never Rejected The World I Came From. To Be Rejected By It Is Horrible.

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

Travel Was Pointless. It Removed You From The Place In Which You Had A Meaning, And To Which You Gave Meaning In Return By Dedicating Your Life To It, And It Spirited You Away Into Fairylands Where You Were, And Looked, Frankly Absurd.

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

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.

I Think Anyone Who Knows Me At All Knows That I Have Been A Movie Addict All My Life. I Grew Up In A City Obsessed By Cinema And Where There Are Cinemas On Every Street Corner.

There Is No Alternative To The Peaceful Coexistence Of Cultures.

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."

In General, Writers Shouldn't Be Killed For What They Write, Though I Can Think Of Exceptions.

It Is Very, Very Easy Not To Be Offended By A Book. You Just Have To Shut It.

Free Societies...are Societies In Motion, And With Motion Comes Tension, Dissent, Friction. Free People Strike Sparks, And Those Sparks Are The Best Evidence Of Freedom's Existence.

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.

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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.

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

It's A Terrible Thing That Your Life Turns Into A Good Story.

One Of The Characteristics Of Mudslinging Is That Mud Sticks If It's Thrown With Enough Force For Long Enough.

You Can't Have Modern States Based On Ideas Which Have Been Out Of Date For A Thousand Years.

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

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

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

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

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.'

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.

What's Real And What's True Aren't Necessarily The Same.

How Does Newness Come Into The World? How Is It Born? Of What Fusions, Translations, Conjoinings Is It Made? How Does It Survive, Extreme And Dangerous As It Is? What Compromises, What Deals, What Betrayals Of Its Secret Nature Must It Make To Stave Off The Wrecking Crew, The Exterminating Angel, The Guillotine? Is Birth Always A Fall? Do Angels Have Wings? Can Men Fly?

Like Everybody Else, I've Had Relationships In Which I Was Passionately In Love But Was Completely Miserable All The Time And Didn't Trust The Person I Was In Love With One Inch.

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

Live On, Survive, For The Earth Gives Forth Wonders. It May Swallow Your Heart, But The Wonders Keep On Coming. You Stand Before Them Bareheaded, Shriven. What Is Expected Of You Is Attention.

Optimism Is A Disease

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

Meaning Is A Shaky Edifice We Build Out Of Scraps, Dogmas, Childhood Injuries, Newspaper Articles, Chance Remarks, Old Fillms, Small Victories, People Hated, People Loved; Perhaps It Is Because Our Sense Of What Is The Case Is Constructed From Such Inadequate Materials That We Defend It So Fiercely, Even To Death.

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

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

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

My Friend Lou Reed Came To The End Of His Song. So Very Sad.but Hey, Lou, You'll Always Take A Walk On The Wild Side. Always A Perfect Day.

Perhaps Because My Relationship With My Father Went Through Such A Long, Bumpy Time, It's Been Very Important For Me To Work To Try To Keep Lines Of Communication Open Between My Sons And Myself To Try To Avoid My Father's Mistakes. At Least If You're Making Mistakes, Make Different Mistakes.

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

The History Of A Culture Can Be Determined By Its Untranslatable Words.

Names, Once They Are In Common Use, Quickly Become Mere Sounds, Their Etymology Being Buried, Like So Many Of The Earth's Marvels, Beneath The Dust Of Habit.

Unfortunately, The Problem Of The Free Speech Argument Is That You Have To Defend People You Can't Stand.

Every Time You Finish A Book, You Have A Terrible Feeling That There's Just Never Going To Be Another One. But Fortunately, So Far, The Next One Has Always Shown Up.

For A Fellow Who's Not To Much To Look At, You Have The Instincts Of A Champion.

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.

Free-form Games In Which The Player Can Make Choices About What The Game Is Going To Be, Become A Kind Of Gaming Equivalent Of The Narrative Possibility.

Language Upon A Silvered Tongue Affords Enchantment Enough.

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

What I've Always Seen In Writers And Artists Is The Courage It Takes To Make An Original Work Of Art. I Think The Real Risks In Literature Are Linguistic And Intellectual, And I Hope We Can Highlight Those, As Well As Political Courage.

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?

We Were Language's Magpies By Nature, Stealing Whatever Sounded Bright And Shiny.

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.

What Kind Of Christmas Present Would Jesus Ask Santa For?

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

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.

Is Birth Always A Fall?

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 One Writer Can Make In The Solitude Of One Room Is Something No Power Can Easily Destroy.

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.

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Have You Noticed The Physical Resemblance Between Imran Khan And Gaddafi? If You Were Making A Movie Of The Life Of Gaddafi And You Wanted A Slightly Better-looking Version Of Gaddafi, You Might Cast Imran Khan.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

This May Be The Curse Of Human Race . Not That We Are Different From One Anther , But We Are So Alike .

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.

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

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

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.

I Stand With Charlie Hebdo, As We All Must, To Defend The Art Of Satire.

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.

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.

Bread And Books: Food For The Body And Food For The Soul - What Could Be More Worthy Of Our Respect, And Even Love?

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.

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.

Sometimes Writing A Novel Is Not Unlike Having A Baby. You'd Have To Ask A Female Novelist To Compare The Pain.

Speaking As Somebody With Three Sisters And A Very Largely Female Muslim Family, There Is Not A Single Woman I Know In My Family Or In Their Friends Who Would Have Accepted The Wearing Of A Veil.

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

They Lived In A Great City, A Metropolis Of Many Narratives That Converged Briefly And Then Separated For Ever, Discovering Their Different Dooms In That Crowd Of Stories Through Which All Of Us, Following Our Own Destinies, Had To Push And Shove To Find Our Way Through, Or Out.

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.

To Put It As Simply As Possible: I Am Not A Muslim.[...] I Do Not Accept The Charge Of Apostacy, Because I Have Never In My Adult Life Affirmed Any Belief, And What One Has Not Affirmed One Can Not Be Said To Have Apostasized From. The Islam I Know States Clearly That 'there Can Be No Coercion In Matters Of Religion'. The Many Muslims I Respect Would Be Horrified By The Idea That They Belong To Their Faith Purely By Virtue Of Birth, And That A Person Who Freely Chose Not To Be A Muslim Could Therefore Be Put To Death.

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.

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

Such Is The Miraculous Nature Of The Future Of Exiles: What Is First Uttered In The Impotence Of An Overheated Apartment Becomes The Fate Of Nations.

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

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.

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.

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.

The Chinese Are Good At Repression And Can Be Pretty Ruthless About It.

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.

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

The Field Of The Novel Is Very Rich. If You're A Composer, You're Well Aware Of The History Of Composition, And You Are Trying To Make Your Music Part Of That History. You're Not Ahistorical. In The Same Way, I Think, If You Write Now, You Are Writing In The Historical Context Of What The Novel Has Been And What Possibilities It Has Revealed.

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

You Can Find Shame In Every House, Burning In An Ashtray, Hanging Framed Upon A Wall, Covering A Bed. But Nobody Notices It Any More.

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

It May Be Argued That The Past Is A Country From Which We Have All Emigrated, That Its Loss Is Part Of Our Common Humanity.

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.

People Must Be Protected From Prejudice Against Their Person. But People Cannot Be Protected From Prejudice Against Their Ideas - Because Otherwise We're All Done.

No, I Don't Think It's Fair To Label Islam 'violent.' But I Will Say That To My Knowledge, No Writer Has Ever Gone Into Hiding For Criticizing The Amish.

When I'm Writing A Book, Sentence By Sentence, I'm Not Thinking Theoretically. I'm Just Trying To Work Out The Story From Inside The Characters I've Got.

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

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.

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.

Whores And Writers, Mahound. We Are The People You Can't Forgive.

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

Prophet Mohammed Would Have No Objection To The Satanic Verses.

‎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.

Life Is Elsewhere. Cross Frontiers. Fly Away.

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.

I'm Definitely Post-something.

Airport Security Exists To Guard Us Against Terrorist Attacks.

Airport Security

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

Madame Bovary And A Flying Carpet, They Are Both Untrue In The Same Way. Somebody Made Them Up.

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

Believe In Your Own Eyes And You'll Get Into A Lot Of Trouble, Hot Water, A Mess.

I Do Think Of Bombay As My Hometown. Those Are The Streets I Walked When I Was Learning To Walk. And It's The Place That My Imagination Has Returned To More Than Anywhere Else.

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.

You Don't That Often See Writers Being Sought Out When There Are Matters Of Great Moment To Discuss. And I Think That's A Loss.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Realism Can Break A Writer's Heart.

I Did A Lot Of Student Acting When I Was Young.

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Thomas B. Macaulay

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