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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.

-Salman Rushdie

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The History Of Life

Salman Rushdie

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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.

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History Of Life

More From Salman Rushdie

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

In India, As Elsewhere In Our Darkening World, Religion Is The Poison In The Blood. Where Religion Intervenes, Mere Innocence Is No Excuse. Yet We Go On Skating Around This Issue, Speaking Of Religion In The Fashionable Language Of 'respect.' What Is There To Respect In Any Of This, Or In Any Of The Crimes Now Being Committed Almost Daily Around The World In Religion's Dreaded Name?

World Religions

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

I Do Not Need The Idea Of God To Explain The World I Live In.

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.

Between Shame And Shamelessness Lies The Axis Upon Which We Turn; Meteorological Conditions At Both These Poles Are Of The Most Extreme, Ferocious Type. Shamelessness, Shame: The Roots Of Violence.

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

The Christian Coalition Is Still About Christianity, Even If It's An Idea Of Christianity That Many Christians Might Not Go Along With.

I Am On Facebook, But Mainly As A Way To Spy On My Children. I Find Out More About Them From Their Facebook Pages Than From What They Tell Me.

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 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.

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

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.

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

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

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

He Would Dream Of Discovering A Magic Optometrist From Whom He Would Purchase A Pair Of Green-tinged Spectacles Which Would Correct His Regrettable Myopia, And After That He Would Be Able To See Through The Dense, Blinding Air To The Fabulous World Beneath.

I've Never Rejected The World I Came From. To Be Rejected By It Is Horrible.

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

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

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.

I've Been Fascinated By Machiavelli Since I Was Very Young. I've Always Felt That He Had A Bad Rap From History, And That He Was Actually A Person Quite Unlike What We Now Think Of As Machiavellian. He Was A Republican. He Disliked Totalitarian Government.

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

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.

In Spite Of All Evidence That Life Is Discontinuous, A Valley Of Rifts, And That Random Chance Plays A Great Part In Our Fates, We Go On Believing In The Continuity Of Things, In Causation And Meaning. But We Live On A Broken Mirror, And Fresh Cracks Appear In Its Surface Every Day.

The World, Somebody Wrote, Is The Place We Prove Real By Dying In It.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I'm No Friend Of Tony Blair's And I Consider The Middle East Policies Of The United States And The Uk Fatal.

I Admit It: Above All Things, I Fear Absurdity.

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.

I Have Always Thought, The Secret Purpose Of The Book Tour Is To Make The Writer Hate The Book He's Written. And, As A Result, Drive Him To Write Another Book.

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

Difficult Relationship

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

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

I Hate Admitting That My Enemies Have A Point.

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

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.

I'm A Novelist. Fortunately I Don't Have To Rule The World.

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

Broad-mindedness Is Related To Tolerance; Open-mindedness Is The Sibling Of Peace.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 Only Met Margaret Thatcher Twice. The Thing That I Thought About Meeting Her Was How Extraordinarily Intelligent She Was. You Really Had To Be On Your Game Otherwise She'd Make Mincemeat Of You.

The People Suffering Most From The Taliban Were Afghans.

Go For Broke. Always Try And Do Too Much. Dispense With Safety Nets. Take A Deep Breath Before You Begin Talking. Aim For The Stars. Keep Grinning. Be Bloody-minded. Argue With The World. And Never Forget That Writing Is As Close As We Get To Keeping A Hold On The Thousand And One Things--childhood, Certainties, Cities, Doubts, Dreams, Instants, Phrases, Parents, Loves--that Go On Slipping , Like Sand, Through Our Fingers.

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.

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

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.

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.

Prophet Mohammed Would Have No Objection To The Satanic Verses.

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.

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

People Are Always Telling Me That They've Seen People Reading My Books On The Subway, Or The Beach, Or Whenever.

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 Problem's Name Is God.

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.

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

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.

I Would Argue That Religion Comes From A Desire To Get To The Questions Of, 'where Do We Come From?' And 'how Shall We Live?' And I Would Say I Don't Need Religion To Answer Those Questions.

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?

Sometimes When You Finish A Book, You Don't Know Quite What You've Got.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Free Speech Is Life Itself.

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

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.

When 'midnight's Children' Came Out, People In The West Tended To Respond To The Fantasy Elements In The Novel, To Praise It In Those Terms. In India, People Read It Like A History Book.

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

I've Been Worrying About God A Little Bit Lately... It Seems Like He's Been In A Bad Mood. And I Think It Has To Do With The Quality Of Lovers He's Been Getting.

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."

The Only Privilege Literature Deserves - And This Privilege It Requires In Order To Exist - Is The Privilege Of Being In The Arena Of Discourse, The Place Where The Struggle Of Our Languages Can Be Acted Out.

If I Had Simply Wanted To Trade On An Insult To Islam, I Could Have Done It In A Sentence Rather Than Writing A 250,000-word Novel, A Work Of Fiction.

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

There Is No Alternative To The Peaceful Coexistence Of Cultures.

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

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've Met The Dalai Lama Briefly, But I Would Probably Say My Grandfather Was The Wisest Person I Ever Met. He Was My Mother's Father, An Indian, A Family Doctor, And Very Unlike Me In That He Was Deeply Religious.

Is Birth Always A Fall?

Our Lives Are Not What We Deserve; They Are, Let Us Agree, In Many Ways Deficient.

We All Owe Death A Life.

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.

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.

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

Faith Without Doubt Is Addiction

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

When You Write, You Write Out Of Your Best Self. Everything Else Drops Away.

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

Unfinished Business

The Usa Approach Looks Like Bullying Because It Is.

Life Is Lived Forward But Is Judged In Reverse.

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.

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

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

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

If You're On A Freeway And Want To Know If You're Being Followed, What You Do Is Enormously Vary Your Speed. You Accelerate To 100 And Slow Down To 30 And Then Accelerate Again. In A City, You Make A Lot Of Turns Against The Stream Of Traffic. You Go Around A Roundabout Twice.

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

English, No Longer An English Language, Now Grows From Many Roots.

English Language

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.

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.

In Writing 'the Satanic Verses,' I Think I Was Writing For The First Time From The Whole Of Myself. The English Part, The Indian Part. The Part Of Me That Loves London, And The Part That Longs For Bombay. And At My Typewriter, Alone, I Could Indulge This.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Good Advice Is Rarer Than Rubies.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

What I Found Interesting Writing A Screenplay As Opposed To Writing A Novel Is Not The Obvious Thing, Which Is Having To Pare Everything Down And Find The Kind Of Essence, The Skeleton If You Like, Which Can Then Be Fleshed Out By Performance And Cinematography.

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.

We Crave Permission Openly To Become Our Secret Selves.

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.

In Television, The 60-minute Series, 'the Wire' And 'mad Men' And So On, The Writer Is The Primary Creative Artist.

As I Look Back, I Feel A Touch Of Pride At My Younger Self's Dedication To Literature, Which Gave Him The Strength Of Mind To Resist The Blandishments Of The Enemies Of Promise. The Sirens Of Ad-land Sang Sweetly And Seductively, But I Thought Of Odysseus Lashing Himself To The Mast Of His Ship, And Somehow Stayed On Course.

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

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

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

How Does Newness Come Into The World? How Is It Born? Of What Fusions, Translations, Conjoinings Is It Made? How Does It Survive, Extreme And Dangerous As It Is? What Compromises, What Deals, What Betrayals Of Its Secret Nature Must It Make To Stave Off The Wrecking Crew, The Exterminating Angel, The Guillotine? Is Birth Always A Fall? Do Angels Have Wings? Can Men Fly?

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

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.

Human Beings Do Not Perceive Things Whole; We Are Not Gods But Wounded Creatures, Cracked Lenses, Capably Only Of Fractured Perceptions. Partial Beings, In All The Senses Of That Phrase.

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

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.

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.

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

The Difference Between Memoir And Autobiography, As Far As I See It, Is That A Memoir Is There Primarily To Tell One Particular Story, Whereas An Autobiography Tries To Be A Full Account Of A Life.

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.

The Writers Of The French Enlightenment Had Deliberately Used Blasphemy As A Weapon, Refusing To Accept The Power Of The Church To Set Limiting Points On Thought.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

You Start At The Stupid End Of The Book, And If You're Lucky You Finish At The Smart End.

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.

From The Beginning Men Used God To Justify The Unjustifiable.

The Glamour Of Being Forbidden Must Not Be Underestimated.

One Of The Things I Do Take Some Pride In Is That If You Had Never Read An Article About My Life, If You Knew Nothing About Me, Except That My Books Were Being Set In Front Of You To Read, And If You Were To Read Those Books In Sequence, I Don't Think You Would Say To Yourself, 'oh My God, Something Terrible Happened To This Writer In 1989.'

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.

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

If The Creative Artist Worries If He Will Still Be Free Tomorrow, Then He Will Not Be Free Today.

I Think People Direct Good Films When They Feel Personal To Them, Not Because It's A Famous Book Or Something. It Has To Something Move Over That And Somehow Become Personal To The Director.

Everybody Loves 'the Wire,' And I Think It's Okay, But In The End It's Just A Police Series.

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 Did A Lot Of Student Acting When I Was Young.

I Am Certainly Not A Good Muslim. But I Am Able Now To Say That I Am Muslim; In Fact It Is A Source Of Happiness To Say That I Am Now Inside, And A Part Of The Community Whose Values Have Always Been Closest To My Heart.

The World Is About The Way In Which Our Dreams Intersect With Our Real Life. Endlessly, The World Of The Imagination Changes The World.

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.

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

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

I'm Not A Prophet, But I Always Thought It Was Natural For Dictatorships To Fall. I Remember In 1989, Two Months Before The Fall Of The Berlin Wall, Had You Said It Was Going To Happen No One Would Have Believed You. The System Seemed Powerful And Unbreakable. Suddenly Overnight It Blew Away Like Dust.

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.

The Idea Of The Sacred Is Quite Simply One Of The Most Conservative Notions In Any Culture, Because It Seeks To Turn Other Ideas - Uncertainty, Progress, Change - Into Crimes.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Cruelty Is Not A Literary Value.

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.'

Having Been Borne Across The World, We Are Translated Men. It Is Normally Supposed That Something Always Gets Lost In Translation; I Cling, Obstinately, To The Notion That Something Can Also Be Gained.

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

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 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.

Freedom To Reject Is The Only Freedom.

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.

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

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