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People Can Do Bad Things With Free Speech As Well As Good. You Have To Defend The Ku Klux Klan As Well As Martin Luther King. It's Like That. If You're Going To Defend The Principle, Then You Have To Defend People Who Use The Principle Badly.

-Salman Rushdie

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People Can Do Bad

Salman Rushdie

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People Can Do Bad Things With Free Speech As Well As Good. You Have To Defend The Ku Klux Klan As Well As Martin Luther King. It's Like That. If You're Going To Defend The Principle, Then You Have To Defend People Who Use The Principle Badly.

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The Only Thing Worse Than A Bad Review From The Ayatollah Khomeini Would Be A Good Review From The Ayatollah Khomeini.

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

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It Is Literature Which For Me Opened The Mysterious And Decisive Doors Of Imagination And Understanding. To See The Way Others See. To Think The Way Others Think. And Above All, To Feel.

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Freedom Is Not A Tea Party, India. Freedom Is A War.

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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.

Khattam-shud,' He Said Slowly, 'is The Arch-enemy Of All Stories, Even Of Language Itself. He Is The Prince Of Silence And The Foe Of Speech. And Because Everything Ends, Because Dreams End, Stories End, Life Ends, At The Finish Of Everything We Use His Name. "it's Finished," We Tell One Another, "it's Over. Khattam-shud: The End.

The Most Obvious Inspiration To Be Brave Is That We All Feel It: You Can't Have Free Expression Right Now In A Very Wide Range Of Countries. It Takes A Lot Of Guts For Writers And Journalists In Those Countries To Stand Up Against Repression And Do What They Do. Russia Is A Case In Point Where, As You Know, Journalists Have An Embarrassing Habit Of Being Killed For Their Reporting.

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.'

Youtube Is Full Of Pieces Of Trash. If You Want To Look On Youtube And Find Something That Insults You, You Can Probably Find It.

Original Thought, Original Artistic Expression Is By Its Very Nature Questioning, Irreverent, Iconoclastic.

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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.

This Strange Business Of What It Is To Be A Writer Is This Increasingly Insane World In Which We Live, In Which Surrealism, It Seems, Is The New Realism.

The Liveliness Of Literature Lies In Its Exceptionality, In Being The Individual, Idiosyncratic Vision Of One Human Being, In Which, To Our Delight And Great Surprise, We May Find Our Own Vision Reflected.

Perhaps The Story You Finish Is Never The One You Begin.

Out-of-step Intellectuals Like Noam Chomsky And The Deceased Edward Said Have Often Been Dismissed As Crazy Extremists, 'anti-american,' And In Mr. Said's Case Even, Absurdly, As Apologists For Palestinian 'terrorism.'

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

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.

Is Birth Always A Fall?

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.

Where There Is No Belief, There Is No Blasphemy.

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.

In The '50s, Listening To Elvis And Others On The Radio In Bombay - It Didn't Feel Alien. Noises Made By A Truck Driver From Tupelo, Mississippi, Seemed Relevant To A Middle-class Kid Growing Up On The Other Side Of The World. That Has Always Fascinated Me.

Literature Is The One Place In Any Society Where, Within The Secrecy Of Our Own Heads, We Can Hear Voices Talking About Everything In Every Possible Way.

‎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.

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

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.

Optimism Is A Disease

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

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.

When...did It Become Irrational To Dislike Religion, Any Religion, Even To Dislike It Vehemently? When Did Reason Get Redescribed As Unreason? When Were The Fairy Stories Of The Superstitious Placed Above Criticism, Beyond Satire? A Religion Was Not A Race. It Was An Idea, And Ideas Stood (or Fell) Because They Were Strong Enough (or Too Weak) To Withstand Criticism, Not Because They Were Shielded From It. Strong Ideas Welcomed Dissent.

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.

You Can Adhere To Your Faith, But That Faith Needs To March In Line With The Rest Of The World And Needs To Find A Way Of Expressing Itself In The Modern World.

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

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The Usa Approach Looks Like Bullying Because It Is.

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

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I Used To Write A Monthly Column For The 'new York Times' Syndicate. But I Stopped Because I Found It Really Hard To Have One Extreme Opinion A Month. I Don't Know How These Columnists Have Two Or Three Ideas A Week; I Was Having Difficulty Having 12 Things To Say A Year.

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.

But There's One Thing We Must All Be Clear About: Terrorism Is Not The Pursuit Of Legitimate Goals By Some Sort Of Illegitimate Means. Whatever The Murderers May Be Trying To Achieve, Creating A Better World Certainly Isn't One Of Their Goals. Instead They Are Out To Murder Innocent People.

To Be Born Again,' Sang Gibreal Farishta Tumbling From The Heaveans, 'first You Have To Die. Ho Ji! Ho Ji! To Land Upon The Bosomy Earth, First One Needs To Fly Tat-taa! Takatun! How To Ever Smile Again, If First You Won't Cry? How To Win The Darling's Love Mister, Without A Sigh?

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.

Faith Without Doubt Is Addiction

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.

Among The Great Struggles Of Man-good/evil, Reason/unreason, Etc.-there Is Also This Mighty Conflict Between The Fantasy Of Home And The Fantasy Of Away, The Dream Of Roots And The Mirage Of The Journey.

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

One Minute You've Got A Lucky Star Watching Over You And The Next Instant It's Done A Bunk.

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

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

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.

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.

If The Culture Shifts, If People Think Differently About Women, The Art Will Shift, Too. You Can't Ask Art To Make Social Change. It's Not What It's For.

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.

Perhaps, If One Wishes To Remain An Individual In The Midst Of The Teeming Multitudes, One Must Make Oneself Grotesque.

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.

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

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

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

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.

One Of The Things I Know From The Study Of History Is That History Surprises You. History Is Not Written. It's Not Inevitable.the Victory Of Evil Is Not Certain.

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

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.

Prophet Mohammed Would Have No Objection To The Satanic Verses.

It Seems That The Right Of Freedom Of Speech That Was Enshrined In Numerous Constitutions Is Now Under Attack By Religious Institutions.

Freedom Of Speech

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

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

Unfinished Business

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.

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Mary Lou Retton

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