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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.

-Salman Rushdie

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The Desire For Story

Salman Rushdie

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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.

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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.

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

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

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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.

In Our Time, We Have Become Too Interested In The Artist And His Or Her Character And Experience As A Way Of Understanding Art. In My View, You Should Be Able To Read A Book Or See A Film Without Knowing A Single Thing About Conditions Or Circumstances Or Character Of The Artist, And Experience The Work To The Full Without Such Information. Sometimes I Feel - Speaking For Myself - That People Know Much Too Much About Me, And I Wish People Knew Less And Could Just Read These Books And Respond To Them Purely As Words On A Page.

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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.

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

Home Has Become Such A Scattered, Damaged, Various Concept In Our Present Travails. There Is So Much To Yearn For. There Are So Few Rainbows Any More.

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

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English Language

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Faith Without Doubt Is Addiction

‎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.

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.

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Gym Motivational

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Realism Can Break A Writer's Heart.

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History Of Life

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Secret Identity

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The End Of The Day

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

Original Thought

He Knew What He Knew: That The Real World Was Full Of Magic, So Magical Worlds Could Easily Be Real.

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Censorship Is The Thing That Stops You Doing What You Want To Do, And What Writers Want To Talk About Is What They Do, Not What Stops Them Doing It.

Doing What You Want

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Few Topographical Boundaries Can Rival The Frontiers Of The Mind.

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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

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.

Until You Know Who You Are You Can’t Write.

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

The Sixty-minute Drama Form Has Become Very Rich.

We Who Have Grown Up On A Diet Of Honour And Shame Can Still Grasp What Must Seem Unthinkable To People Living In The Aftermath Of The Death Of God And Of Tragedy: That Men Will Sacrifice Their Dearest Love On The Implacable Altars Of Their Pride.

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

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.

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

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

We All Owe Death A Life.

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Falling In Love

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.

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

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

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

In The Cookie Of Life, Friends Are The Chocolate Chips.

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

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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.

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Difficult Relationship

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

Once You Get That Instinct For The Fictiveness, The Fictionality Of Fiction, It Kind Of Sets You Free.

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

There's No Point Going To A Country Which Is Torturing People To Ask Them To Stop If They Can Point Out That The United States Is Doing It Too. It Enormously Weakens The Argument. Back In The Early Days Of The Bush Administration, Pen Made A Decision That We Would Try And Make Human Rights Issues And Civil Rights Issues In This Country Part Of The Priority, And Not Just International Issues, Which Had More Or Less Been The Priority Up Until Then.

A Novel, I Think, Is Partly About The Contemporary And Partly About The Eternal, And It's The Balance Of That That's Difficult To Achieve.

I Think The Book Is Less Emotional Than The Film. With The Film, The Emotions Are Much More Raw And In Front. In The Book, They Are Kind Of Ironized And Seen Through Comedy.

A Poet's Work Is To Name The Unnameable, To Point At Frauds, To Take Sides, Start Arguments, Shape The World, And Stop It Going To Sleep.

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

Discovery Is Fun. I Am Incredibly Open To Everything.

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

Vertigo Is The Conflict Between The Fear Of Falling And The Desire To Fall.

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

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

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.

Between The Adored And The Adorer Falls The Shadow.

What Had Been (at The Beginning) No Bigger Than A Full Stop Had Expanded Into A Comma, A Word, A Sentence, A Paragraph, A Chapter; Now It Was Bursting Into More Complex Developments, Becoming, One Might Say, A Book - Perhaps An Encylopaedia - Even A Whole Language.

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

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.

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

We Are Described Into Corners, And Then We Must Describe Ourselves Out Of Corners.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Language Upon A Silvered Tongue Affords Enchantment Enough.

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

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.

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

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 Get A Lot Of Letters - A Lot Of Letters Saying, Who Knew That You Were Funny?

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.

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?

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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.

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

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

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

From The Beginning Men Used God To Justify The Unjustifiable.

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

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

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.

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

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

The Moment You Declare A Set Of Ideas To Be Immune From Criticism, Satire, Derision, Or Contempt, Freedom Of Thought Becomes Impossible.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

Killing People Because You Don't Like Their Ideas - It's A Bad Thing.

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

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 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."

I Want More Than What I Want. (vina Apsara)

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

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

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.

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

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Simon Mainwaring

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