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

-Salman Rushdie

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Sometimes You Find Your

Salman Rushdie

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

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

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.

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

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

Rock N' Roll Was A Kid When I Was A Kid.

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.

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.

My Love For Dan Brown Knows No Bounds. It Literally Has No Mass.

Home Is The Place Where You Feel Happy.

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.

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

Science Fiction Is Where I Started Out, Really. When I Was A Kid, I Was A Complete Addict Of Science Fiction. It Was One Of My Earliest Interests As A Writer, And I've Just Taken A Long Time To Circle Back Around To It.

The History Of Life Was Not The Bumbling Progress - The Very English, Middle-class Progress - Victorian Thought Had Wanted It To Be, But Violent, A Thing Of Dramatic, Cumulative Transformations: In The Old Formulation, More Revolution Than Evolution.

History Of Life

Matthew Wiener On Mad Men Writes The Entire Series Before They Start Shooting, And If You Have That, Then What You Can Do With Character And Story Is Not At All Unlike What You Can Do In A Novel.

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.

Literature Is Where I Go To Explore The Highest And Lowest Places In Human Society And In The Human Spirit, Where I Hope To Find Not Absolute Truth But The Truth Of The Tale, Of The Imagination And Of The Heart.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

I Make No Complaint. I Am A Writer. I Do Not Accept My Condition; I Will Strive To Change It; But I Inhabit It, I Am Trying To Learn From It.

A Book Is Not Completed Till It's Read.

Well, We're Still In The Middle Of It. And It Doesn't Show Any Sign Of Going Away. And These Attacks That Were - That Seemed So Odd At The Time, With "satanic Verses," Because We Didn't Have Any Context For This. You Know, Where Did That Come From? It Seemed To Come Out Of Nowhere.

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.

All Art Began As Sacred Art, You Know? I Mean, All Painting Began As Religious Painting. All Writing Began As Religious Writing.

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

The Thing About Literature Is That, Yes, There Are Kind Of Tides Of Fashion, You Know; People Come In And Out Of Fashion; Writers Who Are Very Celebrated Fall Into, You Know, People You Know Stop Reading Them, And Then It Comes Back Again.

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

The People Suffering Most From The Taliban Were Afghans.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

It Doesn't Matter Whether Characters Are Real People Or Not; If They're Not Vivid On The Page, Then The Reader Doesn't Care About Them That Much, And, If The Reader Doesn't Care About Them That Much, Then They Don't Care What Happens To Them.

Our Lives Teach Us Who We Are.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

I Don't Think There Really Is Much Of A Left In America, Certainly By European Standards Even The Left Is Quite Right Wing Here.

One Of The Problems Of Truth Being Censored For A Really Long Time Is That People Lose The Ability To Intuit What Truth Might Be, And Therefore Begin To Swallow Whatever They're Fed. I Think That's Something That The Chinese Have Learned Very Well. They've Even Managed To Persuade Quite Large Segments Of The Population That The Martyrs Of Tiananmen Were Actually An Anti-national Element. People Don't View Them As Heroes, They See Them As Troublemakers. There You Have A Combination Of Censorship Of Truth Creating A New Truth, Which Is The Lie, But It's Not Seen As Such.

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

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.

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

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.

When We Stop Believing In Gods We Can Start Believing In Their Stories, I Retort. There Are Of Course No Such Things As Miracles, But If There Were And So Tomorrow We Woke Up To Find No More Believers On Earth, No More Devout Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Jews, Why Then, Sure The Beauty Of The Stories Would Be A Thing We Could Focus On Because They Wouldn't Be Dangerous Any More, They Would Become Capable Of Compelling The Only Belief That Leads To Truth, That Is, The Willing, Disbelieving Of The Reader In A Well-told Tale.

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

Two Things Form The Bedrock Of Any Open Society - Freedom Of Expression And Rule Of Law. If You Don't Have Those Things, You Don't Have A Free Country.

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.

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.

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.

We Have Come To Think Of Taking Offence As A Fundamental Right. We Value Very Little More Highly Than Our Rage, Which Gives Us, In Our Opinion, The Moral High Ground. From There We Can Shoot Down At Our Enemies And Inflict Heavy Fatalities.

Moral High Ground

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

I Think The Business Of Writing A Great Deal Of It Is The Business Of Paying Attention To Your Characters, To The World They Live In, To The Story You Have To Tell, But Just A Kind Of Deep Attention And Out Of That If You Pay Attention Properly The Story Will Tell You What It Needs.

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.

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 Fell Victim To The Temptation Of Every Autobiographer, To The Illusion That Since The Past Exists Only In One's Memories And The Words Which Strive Vainly To Encapsulate Them, It Is Possible To Create Past Events Simply By Saying They Occurred.

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.

Sometimes People Have Said That Islam, In Its Own Calendar, Is Still Only In The Middle Ages. It's Still In The Fifteenth Century Or Whatever. And Christianity In The Fifteenth Century, After All, Was Full Of Inquisitions And Burnings At The Stake, And So On And So On. So Give Islam Time, And It Will Reach The Point Of Maturity That Other Religions Have. But Mormonism Is Much Younger Than Islam, And It's Got There Already. So I Don't Think That's An Argument That Works.

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'm A Big-city Boy. What I Like Is Big Cities. It's Not Just What I Like. It's What I Write About.

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

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.

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

Sometimes Legends Make Reality, And Become More Useful Than The Facts.

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

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.

But I - And I Just Think It's Very - One Of The Problems Of Defending The Extraordinary Principle Of Freedom Of Speech Is That You Have To Defend Freedom Of Speech For People Like That Too.

Freedom Of Speech

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

Sometimes We Feel We Straddle Two Cultures; At Other Times, That We Fall Between Two Stools.

The Whole Story Of Migration And What That Has Done In Interconnecting The Planet Is Obviously Something I've Written About A Lot.

England In A Way Is Lucky. It's An Island, So The Frontiers Are Given By The Sea.

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.

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

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

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

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

Difficult Relationship

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.

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.

Fundamentalists Of All Faiths Are The Fundamental Evil Of Our Time.

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.

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.

If You Give In To The Threat Of Violence, If You Give In To Bullying, What You Know Is That There Will Be More Bullying. There Will Not Be Less Bullying. If You Appease The Bully, You Make Sure That He Will Bully You Some More. Not Less. It Doesn't Solve The Problem. It Makes The Problem Worse.

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.

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?

In A Novel, If You're Any Good, You Don't Just Have Good People Or Bad People. You Have Complicated People. You Have Real People.

She's No Flibberti-gibberti Mamzell, But A Whir-stir-get-lost-sir Bundla Dynamite!

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 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.

I've Always Prided Myself On My Discipline As A Writer. I Do It Like A Job. I Get Up In The Morning And Go To My Desk.

A Man Who Invents Himself Needs Someone To Believe In Him... Not Only The Need To Be Believed In, But The Need To Believe In Another. You've Got It: Love.

One Of The Things I've Thought About 'midnight's Children' Is That It Is A Novel Which Puts A Muslim Family At The Centre Of The Indian Experience.

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.

She Saw Him Fracture Into Rainbow Colors Through The Prism Of Her Love.

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.

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

Unfinished Business

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.

What I've Always Tried To Find In My Books Are Points At Which The Private Lives Of The Characters, And Also My Own, Intersect With The Public Life Of The Culture.

People Don't Like Being Around Despair. Our Tolerance For The Truly Hopeless, For Those Who Are Irredeemably Broken By Life Is Strictly Limited. The Sob Stories We Like Are The Ones That End Before We're Bored.

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.

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.

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

Peace, Perfect Peace, In This Dark World Of Sin? The Blood Of Jesus Whispers Peace Within.

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, Which Has Worked Time And Time Again With Pen.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

There Needs To Be A Thorough Examination, By Muslims Everywhere, Of Why It Is That The Faith They Love Breeds So Many Violent Mutant Strains.

In Iran, Fundamentalism Was Fuelled To An Extent By The Regime Of The Shah Being Supported By The West.

There Is A Point Beyond Which Conciliation Looks Like Capitulation. I Do Not Believe I Passed That Point, But Others Have Thought Otherwise.

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 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.

I Beat My Sons In Real-life Table Tennis, But Virtually, I Get Murdered. I Download Games On The Iphone That I'm Addicted To - I'm A Master At "angry Birds."

There Is No Alternative To The Peaceful Coexistence Of Cultures.

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

Sometimes People Have Said That Islam, In Its Own Calendar, Is Still Only In The Middle Ages.

Our Lives Disconnect And Reconnect, We Move On, And Later We May Again Touch One Another, Again Bounce Away. This Is The Felt Shape Of A Human Life, Neither Simply Linear Nor Wholly Disjunctive Nor Endlessly Bifurcating, But Rather This Bouncey-castle Sequence Of Bumpings-into And Tumblings-apart.

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.

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.

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 Always Thought The Front Line Was The Bookstores. And Bookstores Around America, Around The World Did Astonishingly Well. They Held The Line. They Didn't Chicken Out. You Know, They Defended The Book. They Kept It In The Front Of The Store.

There Are Things You Break That Can't Be Put Back Together Again. And Kashmir May Be One Of Them.

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.

Be Sure That You Go To The Author To Get At His Meaning, Not To Find Yours.

Even The Islam Stuff I Thought Was Pretty Respectful About Islam In A Funny Way. I Mean, Yes, From A Secular Point Of View, But It Talks About The Birth Of This Religion, And I Thought It Was Pretty Admiring Of The Person At The Center Of It, The Prophet Of Islam.

In Early Islam, It Was An Absolute Tenet That The Prophet Was Not To Be Worshipped. The Prophet Was A Messenger. And One Of The Things That's Happened In Islam Is This Cult Of The Prophet, Which To My View Is Counter To The Original Tradition.

I'm Not A Big Fan Of There Being Voiceovers In Movies. I Really Prefer It When The Film Tells It Story.

If Turkey Wants To Join Europe, It Will Have To Become A European Country, And That Might Take A Long Time.

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.

Reality Is A Question Of Perspective.

I Have A General Feeling That Writers And Artists Who Are In This Peculiar Situation, Of Being A Persecuted Artist, All Anyone Ever Asks About Is The Persecution. It May Well Be That's The Last Thing In The World They Want To Talk About. There Were Many Years In Which Every Journalist In The World Wanted To Talk To Me, But Nobody Wanted To Talk To Me About My Work. That Felt Deeply Frustrating Because I Felt There Was An Attempt To Stifle Me As An Artist. The Best Revenge I Could Have Was To Write.

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

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

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.

I Didn't Become A Writer To Write About Me.

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.

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.

All Names Mean Something.

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

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

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.

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.

Those Who Do Not Have Power Over The Story That Dominates Their Lives, Power To Retell It, To Rethink It, Deconstruct It, Joke About It, And Change It As Times Change, Truly Are Powerless, Because They Cannot Think New Thoughts.

Airport Security Exists To Guard Us Against Terrorist Attacks.

Airport Security

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.

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.

Prophet Mohammed Would Have No Objection To The Satanic Verses.

There's A Lot Of Conflict And Darkness Inside Everybody's Family. We All Pretend To Outsiders That It's Not So But Behind Locked Doors There Are Usually High Emotions Running.

The Beautiful Came To This City [hollywood] In Huge Pathetic Herds, To Suffer, To Be Humiliated, To See The Powerful Currency Of Their Beauty Devalued Like The Russian Ruble Or Argentine Peso;to Work As Bellhops, As Bar Hostesses, As Garbage Collectors, As Maids. The City Was A Cliff And They Were Its Stampeding Lemmings. At The Foot Of The Cliff Was The Valley Of The Broken Dolls.

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

The Time-honored Role Of The Artist [is] To Speak Truth To Power.

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

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

I'm A Reader Of Chinese Literature, I Like Their Films, But Also: I've Had Great Difficulty Getting My Work Published In China; Very Little Of It Has Been Published There. The First Two Attempts To Have All Of My Work Published, For Instance, Were Refused Without Any Reason Ever Being Given.

A Man Is Sane Only To The Extent That He Subscribes To A Previously-agreed Construction Of Reality.

I Don't Read My Books, I Write Them. Once I've Finished The Many Years It Usually Takes Me To Write Them, I Can't Bear To Read Them, Because I've Spent Too Long With Them Already. I'm Not Advertising Them Very Well, Am I?

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

Our Lives, Our Stories, Flowed Into One Another's, Were No Longer Our Own, Individual, Discrete.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

We Crave Permission Openly To Become Our Secret Selves.

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

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.

Both John F. Kennedy And Nelson Mandela Use The Same Three-word Phrase Which In My Mind Says It All, Which Is ‘freedom Is Indivisible. You Can’t Slice It Up, Otherwise It Ceases To Be Freedom. You Can Dislike Charlie Hebdo … But The Fact That You Dislike Them Has Nothing To Do With Their Right To Speak.

We Are The Only Animals That Tell Stories To Understand The World We Live In.

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

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.

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.

Because I've Always Felt, Whether The Fatwa Or Whatever, The Writer's Great Weapon Is The Truth And Integrity Of His Voice. And As Long As What You're Saying Is What You Truly, Honestly Believe To Be The Case, Then Whatever The Consequences, That's Fine. That's An Honorable Position.

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

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

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 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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Of Course, There Is Nothing Intrinsic Linking Any Religion With Any Act Of Violence. The Crusades Don't Prove That Christianity Was Violent. The Inquisition Doesn't Prove That Christianity Tortures People. But That Christianity Did Torture People.

For Many People, I've Ceased To Be A Human Being. I've Become An Issue, A Bother, An "affair".... And Has It Really Been So Long Since Religions Persecuted People, Burning Them As Heretics, Drowning Them As Witches, That You Can't Recognize Religious Persecution When You See It?

When I Was Writing The Satanic Verses, If You Had Asked Me About The Phenomenon That We All Now Know As Radical Islam, I Wouldn't Have Had Much To Say. As Recently As The Mid-1980s, It Didn't Seem To Be A Big Deal.

The Problem's Name Is God.

Freedom To Reject Is The Only Freedom.

Faith Without Doubt Is Addiction

I'd Wanted To Create A Storm So That I Could Become More Famous And Richer.

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

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

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B. H. Liddell Hart

Miguel Indurain

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