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The Mistake Of The West Was To Put The Sauds On The Throne Of Saudi Arabia And Give Them Control Of The World's Oil Fortune, Which They Then Used To Propagate Wahhabi Islam.

-Salman Rushdie

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The Mistake Of The

Salman Rushdie

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The Mistake Of The West Was To Put The Sauds On The Throne Of Saudi Arabia And Give Them Control Of The World's Oil Fortune, Which They Then Used To Propagate Wahhabi Islam.

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If Terrorism Is To Be Defeated, The World Of Islam Must Take On Board The Secularist-humanist Principles On Which The Modern Is Based, And Without Which Their Countries' Freedom Will Remain A Distant Dream.

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

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.

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.

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

I Had A Very Difficult Relationship With My Father, Which Ended Up Okay, But There Were Many Difficult Years.

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

A Book Is Not Completed Till It's Read.

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

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

One Of The Reasons My Name Is Rushdie Is That My Father Was An Admirer Of Ibn Rush'd, The 12th Century Arab Philosopher Known As Averroes In The West. In His Time, He Was Making The Non-literalist Case For Interpreting The Koran.

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

The Great Concern Is That Year After Year, Rising Numbers Of Journalists Are Being Killed In Pursuit Of Their Work. They Are Increasingly Seen As Not Being Neutral But Rather As Combatants By One Side Or The Other.

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.

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.

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.

Captain Ahab Drowned, He Reminded Himself; It Was The Trimmer, Ishmael, Who Survived.

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.

Look At History. It's Not The Account Of A Species At Peace.

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

Friendships Are The Family We Make - Not The One We Inherit. I've Always Been Someone To Whom Friendship, Elective Affinities, Is As Important As Family.

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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 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.

If I Were Asked For A One-sentence Sound Bite On Religion, I Would Say I Was Against It.

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?

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.

When We Stop Believing In The Gods We Can Start Believing In Their Stories.

In The Real World, Immeasurable Hurt Is Caused By Terrorists Based In Pakistan Who Attack Countries Like India.

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

I Think If We Wish To Live In Any Kind Of A Moral Universe, We Must Hold The Perpetrators Of Violence Responsible For The Violence They Perpetrate. It's Very Simple. The Criminal Is Responsible For The Crime.

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

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

This Paranoid Islam, Which Blames Outsider, 'infidels', For All The Ills Of Muslim Societies, And Whose Proposed Remedy Is The Closing Of Those Societies To The Rival Project Of Modernity, Is Presently The Fastest Growing Version Of Islam In The World.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Many Of Us Didn't Believe In The Image Of Bin Laden As A Wandering Old Man Of The Mountains, Living On Plants And Insects In An Inhospitable Cave Somewhere On The Porous Pakistan-afghan Border.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Happy Endings Must Come At The End Of Something,' The Walrus Pointed Out. 'if They Happen In The Middle Of A Story, Or An Adventure, Or The Like, All They Do Is Cheer Things Up For Awhile.

If You 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.

I Am The Sum Total Of Everything That Went Before Me, Of All I Have Been Seen Done, Of Everything Done-to-me. I Am Everyone Everything Whose Being-in-the-world Affected Was Affected By Mine. I Am Anything That Happens After I'm Gone Which Would Not Have Happened If I Had Not Come.

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.

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.

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