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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.

-Salman Rushdie

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Most American Writers Don't

Salman Rushdie

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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.

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

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.

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

Sometimes I Think That When People Become Famous, There's A Public Perception That They Are Not Human Beings Any More. They Don't Have Feelings; They Don't Get Hurt; You Can Act And Say As You Like About Them.

Masks Beneath Masks Until Suddenly The Bare Bloodless Skull.

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

Thomas Pynchon Looks Exactly Like Thomas Pynchon Should Look. He Is Tall, He Wears Lumberjack Shirts And Blue Jeans. He Has Albert Einstein White Hair And Bugs Bunny Front Teeth.

Sometimes You Find Your Voice By Trying To Write Like People, And Sometimes You Find It By Trying To Write Unlike People.

I've Never Yet Managed To Write A Novel Which Didn't Have An Indian Central Character.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

A Man Who Catches History's Eye Is Thereafter Bound To A Mistress From Whom He Will Never Escape.

What Kind Of A God Is It That's Upset By A Cartoon In Danish?

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

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

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

How Do You Defeat Terrorism? Don’t Be Terrorized.

You Can't Judge An Internal Injury By The Size Of The Hole.

Exile Is A Dream Of A Glorious Return. Exile Is A Vision Of Revolution: Elba, Not St Helena. It Is An Endless Paradox: Looking Forward By Always Looking Back. The Exile Is A Ball Hurled High Into The Air.

When You Have Children, Your Perspective On The Parent-child Relationship Alters.

Life Is Elsewhere. Cross Frontiers. Fly Away.

The Only Position When Violence Is Threatened In Response To A Novel Or A Cartoon Or A Crappy Youtube Video Is A No-surrender Position. This Is How We Live. We Live In A Country In Which We Have These Rights, And We're Not Going To Give Them Up. Full Stop. The End.

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

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

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.

I've Always Thought That One Of The Things That The Internet And The Gaming World Permits As A Narrative Technique Is To Not Tell The Story From Beginning To End - To Tell Stories Sideways, To Give Alternative Possibilities That The Reader Can, In A Way, Choose Between.

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

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

I Have Been A Film Buff All My Life And Believe That The Finest Cinema Is Fully The Equal Of The Best Novels.

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.

Can One Drown In One's Element... If Fish Can Drown In Water, Can Human Beings Suffocate In Air?

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

Language Is Courage: The Ability To Conceive A Thought, To Speak It, And By Doing So To Make It True.

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.

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

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

My Heart Broke Open And History Fell In.

We Are The Storytelling Animal.

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.

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

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.

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

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

What Distinguishes A Great Artist From A Weak One Is First Their Sensibility And Tenderness; Second, Their Imagination, And Third, Their Industry.

Nobody Wants To Read A 600 Page Book In Which The Author Is Fabulous Throughout.

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

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

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

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.

One Of The Strange Things About Violent And Authoritarian Regimes Is They Don't Like The Glare Of Negative Publicity.

The Thing That Always Attracted Me To New York Was The Sense Of Being In A Place Where A Lot Of People Had A Lot Of Stories Not Unlike Mine,' Rushdie Says. 'everybody Comes From Somewhere Else. Everyone's Got A Polish Grandmother, Some Kind Of Metamorphosis In Their Family Circumstances. That's A Very Big Thing - The Experience Of Not Living Where You Started.

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.

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

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

We All Owe Death A Life.

We Live In A Frightened Time, And People Self-censor All The Time And Are Afraid Of Going Into Some Subjects Because They Are Worried About Violent Reactions.

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.

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

If Somebody's Trying To Shut You Up, Sing Louder, And If Possible, Better.

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

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

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.

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.

Language Upon A Silvered Tongue Affords Enchantment Enough.

I Do Not Read The Works Of Salman Rushdie, I Write Them. By The Time I Have Finished Writing Them All I Can Think Of Is Never Reading Them Again. It's So Deep, Your Involvement With A Book, That Once It's Finished, Then You Are Really Done With It.

Ignorantly Is How We All Fall In Love; For It Is A Kind Of Fall. Closing Our Eyes, We Leap From That Cliff In Hope Of A Soft Landing. Nor Is It Always Soft; But Still, Without That Leap Nobody Comes To Life.

My Grandmother Was Very Fierce And Gruff. She Was Quite Small, But She Was Very Wide.

People Would Come And Threaten Them. And They Would Respond By Putting The Book In The Window. Behind That, The Publishers, Many Of Whom Were Menaced And Receiving Anonymous Phone Calls Of The Very Menacing Kind And So, Almost Everybody - Not Everybody, But Almost Everybody Held The Line.

I Needed My Stuff Around Me, And In That Little Cocoon I Felt Good, And I Could Work.

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 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.

I Remember When I Was Young, Many Cities In The Muslim World Were Cosmopolitan Cities With A Lot Of Culture.

I Know Who I Am, I Know What I'm For, And I Know What I'm Willing To Fight For.

Certainly, The Hollywood Cinema, There's Almost Nothing Of Interest Coming Out Of There.

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.

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

Extraordinary Things

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

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."

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.

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.

I Don't Dictate To Anyone What To Believe And What Not To. And I Don't Want That To Be Dictated To Me Either.

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

Nobody Ever Recognizes Themselves Unless They Are Not The Character. There Are Many People Who Have Claimed To Be In My Books, But Unfortunately They Were Usually People That I Didn't Know.

What Is Needed Is A Move Beyond Tradition, Nothing Less Than A Reform Movement To Bring The Core Concepts Of Islam Into The Modern Age, A Muslim Reformation To Combat Not Only The Jihadist Ideologues But Also The Dusty, Stifling Seminaries Of The Traditionalists, Throwing Open The Windows To Let In Much-needed Fresh Air.... It Is High Time, For Starters, That Muslims Were Able To Study The Revelation Of Their Religion As An Event Inside History, Not Supernaturally Above It.... Broad-mindedness Is Related To Tolerance; Open-mindedness Is The Sibling Of Peace.

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

Difficult Questions

We Look Up And We Hope The Stars Look Down, We Pray That There May Be Stars For Us To Follow, Stars Moving Across The Heavens And Leading Us To Our Destiny, But It's Only Our Vanity. We Look At The Galaxy And Fall In Love, But The Universe Cares Less About Us Than We Do About It, And The Stars Stay In Their Courses However Much We May Wish Upon Them To Do Otherwise. It's True That If You Watch The Sky-wheel Turn For A While You'll See A Meteor Fall, Flame And Die. That's Not A Star Worth Following; It's Just An Unlucky Rock. Our Fates Are Here On Earth. There Are No Guiding Stars.

Falling In Love

Without Water We Are Nothing", The Traveler Thought. "even An Emperor, Denied Water, Would Swiftly Turn To Dust. Water Is The Real Monarch And We Are All Its Slaves.

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.

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.

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

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.

The Only Way Of Living In A Free Society Is To Feel That You Have The Right To Say And Do Stuff.

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.

I Always Thought Storytelling Was Like Juggling [...] You Keep A Lot Of Different Tales In The Air, And Juggle Them Up And Down, And If You're Good You Don't Drop Any.

A Book Is A Product Of A Pact With The Devil That Inverts The Faustian Contract, He'd Told Allie. Dr Faustus Sacrificed Eternity In Return For Two Dozen Years Of Power; The Writer Agrees To The Ruination Of His Life, And Gains (but Only If He's Lucky) Maybe Not Eternity, But Posterity, At Least. Either Way (this Was Jumpy's Point) It's The Devil Who Wins.

There Is Nothing Like A War For The Reinvention Of Lives.

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?

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.

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.

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

Why Speak If You Can't Manage Perfect Thoughts, Perfect Sentences?

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.

Shame Is Like Everything Else; Live With It For Long Enough And It Becomes Part Of The Furniture.

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

No Story Comes From Nowhere; New Stories Are Born From Old.

Thought I Was Doing Two Things. One Is Inquiring Into The Phenomenon Of Revelation, If You Are Not A Religious Person. But, Clearly, It's A Sincere Phenomenon.

Sometimes Great, Banned Works Defy The Censor's Description And Impose Themselves On The World - 'ulysses,' 'lolita,' The 'arabian Nights.'

Free Speech Is Life Itself.

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

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

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.

There Are Two Things In Indian History - One Is The Incredible Optimism And Potential Of The Place, And The Other Is The Betrayal Of That Potential - For Example, Corruption. Those Two Strands Intertwine Through The Whole Of Indian History, And Maybe Not Just Indian History.

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.

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.

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

Actually, I Don't Even Like Parties. I Would Much Prefer A Room With Four Friends Who Sit Around And Have Dinner. I Detest Nightclubs. And I Don't Like Places Where The Noise Is So Loud You Can't Talk To People.

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.

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.

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.

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

This Is Going To Make Me Sound Ancient, But I Remember Juhu Beach When There Weren't Any Buildings On It. You'd Go Through Countryside And Arrive At This Amazing Beach. I Remember Driving From Delhi To The Qutab Minar Through Countryside. Mehrauli Was A Little Village - That's All Gone.

I Hate Admitting That My Enemies Have A Point.

Liberate Yourself, Because No One Else Is Going To Liberate You

Gym Motivational

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

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

It's True That The Human Body Is More Vulnerable Than The Products Of The Human Mind.

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

Between The Adored And The Adorer Falls The Shadow.

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.

If You Actually Want To Change Your World, There Is A Better Way Of Doing It Than Blowing Yourself Up.

All Names Mean Something.

How To Forgive The World For Its Beauty, Which Merely Disguises Its Ugliness; For Its Gentleness, Which Merely Cloaks Its Cruelty; For Its Illusion Of Continuity, Seamlessly, As The Night Follows The Day, So To Speak- Whereas In Reality Life Is A Series Of Brutal Raptures, Falling Upon Your Defenseless Hands, Like The Blows Of A Woodman's Axe?

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.

Anyone Who Reads My Work Will See That There Are Often Difficult Relationships Between Fathers And Sons.

Difficult Relationship

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

I Became A Writer Because I Got Addicted To Story. The First Storyteller In My Life Was My Father.

I Do Think That There Is Such A Thing As Human Nature, And That The Things That We Have In Common Are Perhaps Greater Than The Things That Divide Us.

If You Want To Draw People Into The Story, You Really Have To Write As If You're Writing A Novel And Make These Actually-existing People, Including The Actually-existing Person With My Name, Into A Believable Person On The Page. And That Requires Distance. That Requires Not Being Right Up Against The Events You're Talking About.

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.

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.

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.

The Sixty-minute Drama Form Has Become Very Rich.

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

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

The West Should Be Tougher On Pakistan. It Is Trying To Play Both Ends Against The Middle - To Look Like The Friend Of The Revolutionaries On The One Hand And A Friend Of The West In The Fight Against Terrorism. It Can't Be Both Things.

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.

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

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.

What I Do Think Is Evident Is That Those Countries In The World Where Islamic Extremism Has Recovered The Most Power, Those Are Also The Countries Which Are Most Disliked.

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.

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've Never Seen Anywhere In The World As Beautiful As Kashmir. It Has Something To Do With The Fact That The Valley Is Very Small And The Mountains Are Very Big, So You Have This Miniature Countryside Surrounded By The Himalayas, And It's Just Spectacular. And It's True, The People Are Very Beautiful Too.

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

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.

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

You Don't Just - You Often Have To Defend The Freedoms Of People You Don't Like, You Know, Whose Work You Don't Like, Because Freedom Of Speech Is Not Just For Serious People. It's Also For Trashy People. So, And, Unfortunately, This Is At The Trashy End Of The Scale.

Freedom Of Speech

I'm Definitely Post-something.

Good Advice Is Rarer Than Rubies.

If By Some Bizarre Chance There Turns Out To Be A God [...], I'm Willing To Bet He's An Atheist Too.

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.

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.

In The Movies, The Writer Is Just The Servant, The Employee.

Faith Without Doubt Is Addiction

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.

It's Difficult Not To Color Our Perception Of Author's Product With His Personality. There Are So Many Examples Of This. What Do We Think Of Ezra Pound - Clearly A Great Poet And Clearly Kind Of An Asshole? You Can Say The Same Thing About Louis-ferdinand Céline, Who Clearly Was A Nazi Sympathizer, And Yet One Of The Great Writers Of The 20th Century. It Is Tough, But There Are Enough Examples Around Where We Have To Somehow Find A Way Of Separating The Work From The Artist And Seeing What There Is To See In The Work, While Also Condemning The Thoughts We See In The Man.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

A Sigh Isn't Just A Sigh. We Inhale The World And Breathe Out Meaning. While We Can. While We Can.

...in Words And Pickles, I Have Immortalized My Memories, Although Distortions Are Inevitable In Both Methods. We Must Live, I'm Afraid, With The Shadows Of Imperfections.

Very Often In Free Speech Cases You Find Yourself Defending Material That You Personally Detest, Because Of Course It's No Trick To Defend The Free Speech Of People You Either Agree With Or Who Don't Particularly Upset You. It's When People Really Upset You That You Discover If You Believe In Free Speech Or Not.

The Novel Does Not Seek To Establish A Privileged Language But It Insists Upon The Freedom To Portray And Analyze The Struggle Between The Different Contestants For Such Privileges.

You've Got A Generation Of Young Men - Almost All Are Young Men - In Situations Of Great Economic Hardship, Where They Don't Really Have Work. The Chances Of Them Making A Decent Life For Themselves, Of Making A Family, Living In A Kind Of Decent, Happy Way, Are Very, Very Remote. It's Very Hard For Them To Ever Even Have That As A Dream, So When People Are That Deprived Of The Ordinary Hope Of Human Beings, It Creates Anger. And That Anger Can Be Channeled By Unscrupulous Persons, Whether Secular Or Religious Leaders, And There's Been A Lot Of That.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

All My Adult Life, If I Didn't Have Several Hours A Day To Sit In A Room By Myself, I Would Get Antsy And Irritable.

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

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.

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.

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.

I Think That England Made A Very Big, Historical Mistake To Allow Itself To Become The Kind Of Terrorist Capital Of The World.

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 Acceptance That All That Is Solid Has Melted Into The Air, That Reality And Morality Are Not Givens But Imperfect Human Constructs, Is The Point From Which Fiction Begins.

There Was A Series Called 'game Of Thrones' Which Was Very Popular Here In The United States, A Post-tolkien Kind Of Thing. It Was Garbage, Yet Very Addictive Garbage - Because There's Lots Of Violence, All The Women Take Their Clothes Off All The Time, And It's Kind Of Fun.

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.

Writers And Politicians Are Natural Rivals. Both Groups Try To Make The World In Their Own Images; They Fight For The Same Territory.

Cruelty Is Not A Literary Value.

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