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Memory Has Its Own Special Kind. It Selects, Eliminates, Alters, Exaggerates, Minimizes, Glorifies, And Vilifies Also; But In The End It Creates Its Own Reality, Its Heterogeneous But Usually Coherent Version Of Events; And No Sane Human Being Ever Trusts Someone Else's Version More Than His Own.

-Salman Rushdie

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Memory Has Its Own

Salman Rushdie

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Memory Has Its Own Special Kind. It Selects, Eliminates, Alters, Exaggerates, Minimizes, Glorifies, And Vilifies Also; But In The End It Creates Its Own Reality, Its Heterogeneous But Usually Coherent Version Of Events; And No Sane Human Being Ever Trusts Someone Else's Version More Than His Own.

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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 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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A Little Bit Of One Story Joins Onto An Idea From Another, And Hey Presto, . . . Not Old Tales But New Ones. Nothing Comes From Nothing.

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When I'm Writing Books, Something Weird Happens; And The Result Is The Books Contain A Large Amount Of What You Could Call 'supernaturalism.' As A Writer, I Find I Need That To Explain The World I'm Writing About.

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.

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.

Is Birth Always A Fall?

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

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.

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

A Book Is Not Completed Till It's Read.

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

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.

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The Suicide Bomber's Imagination Leads Him To Believe In A Brilliant Act Of Heroism, When In Fact He Is Simply Blowing Himself Up Pointlessly And Taking Other People's Lives.

One Of The Problems With Defending Free Speech Is You Often Have To Defend People That You Find To Be Outrageous And Unpleasant And Disgusting.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Pakistan Is Alarmed By The Rising Indian Influence In Afghanistan, And Fears That An Afghanistan Cleansed Of The Taliban Would Be An Indian Client State, Thus Sandwiching Pakistan Between Two Hostile Countries. The Paranoia Of Pakistan About India's Supposed Dark Machinations Should Never Be Underestimated.

God, Satan, Paradise, And Hell All Vanished One Day In My Fifteenth Year, When I Quite Abruptly Lost My Faith. ... And Afterwards, To Prove My New-found Atheism, I Bought Myself A Rather Tasteless Ham Sandwich, And So Partook For The First Time Of The Forbidden Flesh Of The Swine. No Thunderbolt Arrived To Strike Me Down. ... From That Day To This I Have Thought Of Myself As A Wholly Secular Person.

What's The Use Of Stories That Aren't Even True?

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.

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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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Doing What You Want

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.

A People That Has Remained Convinced Of Its Greatness And Invulnerability, That Has Chosen To Believe Such A Myth In The Face Of All The Evidence, Is A People In The Grip Of A Kind Of Sleep, Or Madness.

Memory Has Its Own Special Kind. It Selects, Eliminates, Alters, Exaggerates, Minimizes, Glorifies, And Vilifies Also; But In The End It Creates Its Own Reality, Its Heterogeneous But Usually Coherent Version Of Events; And No Sane Human Being Ever Trusts Someone Else's Version More Than His Own.

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

The Worst, Most Insidious Effect Of Censorship Is That, In The End, It Can Deaden The Imagination Of The People. Where There Is No Debate, It Is Hard To Go On Remembering, Every Day, That There Is A Suppressed Side To Every Argument.

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To See Things Plainly, You Have To Cross A Frontier.

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

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Rock And Roll Music - The Music Of Freedom Frightens People And Unleashes All Manner Of Conservative Defense Mechanisms.

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.

When I Am Writing Novels I Don't Read A Lot Of Novels So I Try To Catch Up In-between.

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

Free Speech Is Life Itself.

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

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

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'm Gone Which Would Not Have Happened If I Had Not Come.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

My Horizon's Have Shrunk And I Have Only Endings To Write.

Our Human Tragedy Is That We Are Unable To Comprehend Our Experience, It Slips Through Our Fingers, We Can't Hold On To It, And The More Time Passes, The Harder It Gets...my Father Said That The Natural World Gave Us Explanations To Compensate For The Meanings We Could Not Grasp. The Slant Of The Cold Sunlight On A Winter Pine, The Music Of Water, An Oar Cutting The Lake And The Flight Of Birds, The Mountains' Nobility , The Silence Of The Silence. We Are Given Life But Must Accept That It Is Unattainable And Rejoice In What Can Be Held In The Eye, The Memory, The Mind.

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.

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

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

It Matters, It Always Matters, To Name Rubbish As Rubbish; That To Do Otherwise Is To Legitimize It.

When You Throw Everything Up In The Air Anything Becomes Possible.

Optimism Is A Disease

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.

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

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

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

Normally When I Read, I Don't Like Music Playing.

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

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

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.

I Write Books I'd Enjoy Reading, I'm The Reader Standing Behind My Shoulder.

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

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

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.

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.

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

What Is Freedom Of Expression? Without The Freedom To Offend, It Ceases To Exist.

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.

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

Unfinished Business

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

Where There Is No Belief, There Is No Blasphemy.

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.

The Only Way To Find Out Why Someone Decides To Engage In Armed Combat Is To Look At Their Individual Personality.

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

It Just Requires So Much Of You, And Most Of The Time You Feel Dumb.

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.

Islam Doesn't Have To Mean Blind Faith. It Can Mean What It Always Meant In Your Family, A Culture, A Civilization, As Open-minded As Your Grandfather Was, As Delightedly Disputatious As Your Father Was.... Don't Let The Zealots Make Muslim A Terrifying Word, I Urged Myself; Remember When It Meant Family.

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

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.

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.

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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.

For Every Snake, There Is A Ladder; For Every Ladder,a Snake

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

And Using That - The Birth Of A Religion, It Suggests That You Have Got Two Tests. You Have The Test Of Weakness. When You're Weak, Do You Compromise, Do You Bend, Do You Give In, Do You Accommodate? And Then The Test Of Strength. When You're Strong, Are You Merciful, Are You Generous, Or Are You Cruel?

Happy Endings Must Come At The End Of Something,' The Walrus Pointed Out. 'if They Happen In The Middle Of A Story, Or An Adventure, Or The Like, All They Do Is Cheer Things Up For Awhile.

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.

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.'

If You Take A Look At History, You Will Find That The Understanding Of What Is Good And Evil Has Always Existed Before The Individual Religions. The Religions Were Only Invented By People Afterwards, In Order To Express This Idea.

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.

I Don't Know What To Say About Literary Critics. I Think It's Probably Best To Say Nothing.

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

Literature Is The One Place In Any Society Where, Within The Secrecy Of Our Own Heads, We Can Hear Voices Talking About Everythingin Every Possible Way. The Reason For Ensuring That That Privileged Arena Is Preserved Is Not That Writers Want The Absolute Freedom To Say And Do Whatever They Please. It Is That We, All Of Us, Readers And Writers And Citizens And Generals And Goodmen, Need That Little, Unimportant-looking Room. We Do Not Need To Call It Sacred, But We Do Need To Remember That It Is Necessary.

Sometimes, People Trying To Commit Suicide Manage It In A Manner That Leaves Them Breathless With Astonishment.

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

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.

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.

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

British Society Has Never Been Cleansed Of The Filth Of Imperialism.

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

Most Of What Matters In Your Life Takes Place In Your Absence.

I've Never Had Very High Regard For Therapists. I Owe My Health, My Mental Survival, To My Friends And Loved Ones.

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

Children Like Being A Little Scared, But They Don't Want To Be Disturbed.

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

Home Is The Place Where You Feel Happy.

Only The Foolish, Blinded By Language's Conventions, Think Of Fire As Red Or Gold. Fire Is Blue At It's Melancholy Rim, Green In It's Envious Heart. It May Burn White, Or Even, In It's Greatest Rages, Black.

I Used To Say, 'there Is A God-shaped Hole In Me.' For A Long Time I Stressed The Absence, The Hole. Now I Find It Is The Shape Which Has Become More Important.

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.

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

That's The Trouble With You Sad-city Types: A Place Has To Be Miserable And Dull As Ditchwater Before You Believe It's Real.

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.

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

Cruelty Is Not A Literary Value.

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.

Life Is Elsewhere. Cross Frontiers. Fly Away.

I Grew Up In A Family In Which There Was Very Little Religion. My Father Wasn't Religious At All. But He Was Really Interested In The Subject Of, You Know, The Birth And Growth Of Islam. And He Basically Transmitted That Interest To Me.

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

Extraordinary Things

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.

I Do Not Envy People Who Think They Have A Complete Explanation Of The World, For The Simple Reason That They Are Obviously Wrong.

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

Someone Asked Me If I Was Afraid To Write My Memoirs. I Told Him: 'we Have To Stop Drawing Up Accounts Of Fear! We Live In A Society In Which People Are Allowed To Tell Their Story, And That Is What I Do.'

The Problem Of Telling Contemporary History Is That Your Message Gets Outdated.

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 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

You Can't Assume If You Do Something Contentious That People Will Be On Your Side. The Moment Violence Enters The Story, The Story Changes. Then The Question Is, "how Do You Face Up To Violence?" And Then You Have To Have A No-compromise Position. And This Is Quite Simply A Lesson We Learn In The School Playground.

Religion, A Mediaeval Form Of Unreason, When Combined With Modern Weaponry Becomes A Real Threat To Our Freedoms.

What Is Freedom Of Expression? Without The Freedom To Offend, It Ceases To Exist. Without The Freedom To Challenge, Even To Satirize All Orthodoxies, It Ceases To Exist. Language And The Imagination Cannot Be Imprisoned, Or Art Will Die, And With It, A Little Of What Makes Us Human.

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.

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.

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.

History Could Claw Upward As Well As Down. The Powerful Could Be Deafened By The Cries Of The Poor.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Reality Is A Question Of Perspective.

Friendships Are The Family We Make - Not The One We Inherit. I've Always Been Someone To Whom Friendship, Elective Affinities, Is As Important As Family.

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

I'm Definitely Post-something.

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Charles Evans Hughes

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