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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.

-Salman Rushdie

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The Most Obvious Inspiration

Salman Rushdie

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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.

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

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.

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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.

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

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.

So India’s Problem Turns Out To Be The World’s Problem. What Happened In India Has Happened In God’s Name. The Problem’s Name Is God.

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.

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?

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

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.

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.

Ignorantly Is How We All Fall In Love; For It Is A Kind Of Fall. Closing Our Eyes, We Leap From That Cliff In Hope Of A Soft Landing. Nor Is It Always Soft; But Still, Without That Leap Nobody Comes To Life.

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.

My Heart Broke Open And History Fell In.

The First Amendment Defends All Forms Of Speech Including Hate Speech, Which Is Why Groups Like Ku Klux Klan Are Allowed To Utter Their Poisonous Remarks.

If Love Is A Yearning To Be Like (even To Become) The Beloved, Then Hatred, It Must Be Said, Can Be Engendered By The Same Ambition, When It Cannot Be Fulfilled.

The Interesting Thing About History Sometimes. Is That You Know These People Existed, And You Knew What Jobs They Did, But You Don't Know Much About Them As People, So You Actually Have To Make Them Up.

I Don't Like Books That Play To The Gallery, But I've Become More Concerned With Telling A Story As Clearly And Engagingly As I Can.

I Am Gagged And Imprisoned. I Can't Even Speak. I Want To Kick A Football In A Park With My Son. Ordinary, Banal Life: My Impossible Dream.

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.

India, The New Myth--a Collective Fiction In Which Anything Was Possible, A Fable Rivalled Only By The Two Other Mighty Fantasies: Money And God.

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

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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.

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If My Child Had Prejudice In His Head, I'd Be Ashamed. I Would See It As My Failure As A Parent.

I Had Become A Kind Of Information Magpie, Gathering To Myself All Manner Of Shiny Scraps Of Fact And Hokum And Books And Art-history And Politics And Music And Film, And Developing, Too, A Certain Skill In Manipulating And Arranging These Pitiful Shards So That They Glittered And Caught The Light. Fool's Gold, Or Priceless Nuggets Mined From My Singular Childhood's Rich Bohemian Seam? I Leave It To Others To Decide.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The West Sees Iran As An Important Force In The Gulf.

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.

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

Acting Was Always My Unscratched Itch, When I Was In College And Even Afterwards.

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If Bigots Behave Like Bigots, It's Not A Huge Surprise.

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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.

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

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Bin Laden Was Born Filthy Rich And Died In A Rich Man's House, Which He Had Painstakingly Built To The Highest Specifications.

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

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

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

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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You Can't Judge An Internal Injury By The Size Of The Hole.

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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.

My Grandmother Was Very Fierce And Gruff. She Was Quite Small, But She Was Very Wide.

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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.

They Lived In A Great City, A Metropolis Of Many Narratives That Converged Briefly And Then Separated For Ever, Discovering Their Different Dooms In That Crowd Of Stories Through Which All Of Us, Following Our Own Destinies, Had To Push And Shove To Find Our Way Through, Or Out.

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

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

If You're Going To Write A Memoir, Try To Be As Honest And Open As You Can.

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

Human Beings Understand Themselves And Shape Their Futures By Arguing And Challenging And Questioning And Saying The Un-sayable, Not By Bowing The Knee Whether To Gods Or To Men.

Five Mysteries Hold The Keys To The Unseen: The Act Of Love, And The Birth Of A Baby, And The Contemplation Of Great Art, And Being In The Presence Of Death Or Disaster, And Hearing The Human Voice Lifted In Song.

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

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I Seem To Have Fallen For Women With Missing Parents. Goodness Knows What It Signifies.

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

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."

Every Time You Finish A Book, You Have A Terrible Feeling That There's Just Never Going To Be Another One. But Fortunately, So Far, The Next One Has Always Shown Up.

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

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.

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.'

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

Original Thought

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

Freedom Of Speech

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.

When People Use The Term Magic Realism, Usually They Only Mean 'magic' And They Don't Hear 'realism', Whereas The Way In Which Magic Realism Actually Works Is For The Magic To Be Rooted In The Real. It's Both Things. It's Not Just A Fairytale Moment. It's The Surrealism That Arises Out Of The Real.

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There Is No Magic On Earth Strong Enough To Wipe Out The Legacies Of One's Parents.

I Stand With Charlie Hebdo, As We All Must, To Defend The Art Of Satire, Which Has Always Been A Force For Liberty And Against Tyranny, Dishonesty And Stupidity.

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.

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

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

We Have Seen Many Other Not Just Writers And Intellectuals, But Including Writers And Intellectuals In The Muslim World Being Attacked And Murdered By Islamic Fanatics, Accused Of Exactly The Same Things That I Was, These Medieval Crimes Of Apostasy And Heresy, But Then Broadening From That Into A Broader Attack On All Of Us.

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

When You Are Writing A Book, It Feels As If You Are Simply Concentrating On The World Of The Book And That Whatever Is Happening In Your Personal Life Is Outside The Room, As It Were. But Maybe That's Just The Way You Have To Talk To Yourself To Make It Possible.

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

I Thought, You Know, I Would Probably Not Have Seen That. On The Other Hand, He's Obviously Completely Telling The Truth. So, Then What Is That? That's - I Wanted To Explore That. And Then I Wanted To Talk About How Ideas Are Born. And The Big Question That The Book Asks In A Number Of Ways About A Number Of Things Is That. How Does A New Idea Come Into The World?

At The Height Of The British Empire Very Few English Novels Were Written That Dealt With British Power. It's Extraordinary That At The Moment In Which England Was The Global Superpower The Subject Of British Power Appeared Not To Interest Most Writers.

I Write Books I'd Enjoy Reading, I'm The Reader Standing Behind My Shoulder.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We All Owe Death A Life.

When You Throw Everything Up In The Air Anything Becomes Possible.

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

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

A Book Is A Product Of A Pact With The Devil That Inverts The Faustian Contract, He'd Told Allie. Dr Faustus Sacrificed Eternity In Return For Two Dozen Years Of Power; The Writer Agrees To The Ruination Of His Life, And Gains (but Only If He's Lucky) Maybe Not Eternity, But Posterity, At Least. Either Way (this Was Jumpy's Point) It's The Devil Who Wins.

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.'

[my Work] Is A Love Song To Our Mongrel Selves.

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.

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.

The People Suffering Most From The Taliban Were Afghans.

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It's Kennedy's War, Vietnam. Lyndon Johnson Got All The Flak, But It's Kennedy's War.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

It May Be That The Books That Were Best Liked In Your Lifetime Are Not The Ones That Are Best Liked 100 Years Later.

‎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.

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

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

Speaking As Somebody With Three Sisters And A Very Largely Female Muslim Family, There Is Not A Single Woman I Know In My Family Or In Their Friends Who Would Have Accepted The Wearing Of A Veil.

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

Obviously, A Rigid, Blinkered, Absolutist World View Is The Easiest To Keep Hold Of, Whereas The Fluid, Uncertain, Metamorphic Picture I've Always Carried About Is Rather More Vulnerable.

A Sigh Isn't Just A Sigh. We Inhale The World And Breathe Out Meaning. While We Can. While We Can.

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.

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

If A Birth Is The Fall-out From The Explosion Caused By The Union Of Two Unstable Elements, Then Perhaps A Half-life Is All We Can Expect.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Our Lives Teach Us Who We Are.

Wherever Goodness Lay, It Did Not Lie In Ritual, Unthinking Obeisance Before A Deity But Rather, Perhaps, In The Slow Clumsy, Error-strewn Working Out Of An Individual Or Collective Path.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Sometimes I Think That When People Become Famous, There's A Public Perception That They Are Not Human Beings Any More. They Don't Have Feelings; They Don't Get Hurt; You Can Act And Say As You Like About Them.

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Mystical Experiences

Meaning Is A Shaky Edifice We Build Out Of Scraps, Dogmas, Childhood Injuries, Newspaper Articles, Chance Remarks, Old Fillms, Small Victories, People Hated, People Loved; Perhaps It Is Because Our Sense Of What Is The Case Is Constructed From Such Inadequate Materials That We Defend It So Fiercely, Even To Death.

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

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.

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.

It's Difficult Not To Color Our Perception Of Author's Product With His Personality. There Are So Many Examples Of This. What Do We Think Of Ezra Pound - Clearly A Great Poet And Clearly Kind Of An Asshole? You Can Say The Same Thing About Louis-ferdinand Céline, Who Clearly Was A Nazi Sympathizer, And Yet One Of The Great Writers Of The 20th Century. It Is Tough, But There Are Enough Examples Around Where We Have To Somehow Find A Way Of Separating The Work From The Artist And Seeing What There Is To See In The Work, While Also Condemning The Thoughts We See In The Man.

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

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

The Enemy For The Fanatic Is Pleasure, Which Makes It Extremely Important To Continue To Indulge In Pleasure. Dance Madly. That Is How You Get Rid Of Terrorism.

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

Airport Security Exists To Guard Us Against Terrorist Attacks.

Airport Security

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 Frustrating Part Of Being Tagged 'controversial' Is People Go Looking For Trouble Where There Isn't Any To Look For.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

What Happened In Pakistan Was That People Were Told: You're All Muslim, So Now You're A Country. As We Saw In 1971 With The Bangladesh Secession, The Answer To That Was: 'oh No, We're Not.'

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

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.

Human Beings, You See, Do Absolutely Two Primary Things. We See Like And Unlike. Like Becomes, In Literature, Simile And Metaphor. Unlike Becomes Uniqueness And Difference, From Which I Believe, The Novel Is Born.

What You Were Is Forever Who You Are.

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.

Fundamentalists Believe That We Don't Believe In Anything. In Their View Of The World, They Are In Possession Of Absolute Certainties, While We Are Descending Into Decadence. We Will Be Able To Triumph Over Terrorism Not By Waging War On It, But Through A Conscious, Fearless Way Of Life.

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.

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

When You Write You In A Way Write Out Of What You Think Of As Your Best Self, The Part Of You That Is Lacking In Foibles And Weaknesses And Egotism And Vanities And So On. You're Just Trying To Really Say Something As Truthful As You Can Out Of The Best That You Have In You.

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.

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

I Know That When People Pull Apart, They Usually Employ Misunderstanding As A Weapon, Deliberately Getting Hold Of The Stick's Wrong End, Impaling Themselves On Its Point In Order To Prove The Perfidy Of The Other.

Free Societies...are Societies In Motion, And With Motion Comes Tension, Dissent, Friction. Free People Strike Sparks, And Those Sparks Are The Best Evidence Of Freedom's Existence.

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

The Worst, Most Insidious Effect Of Censorship Is That, In The End, It Can Deaden The Imagination Of The People. Where There Is No Debate, It Is Hard To Go On Remembering, Every Day, That There Is A Suppressed Side To Every Argument.

When I Am Writing Novels I Don't Read A Lot Of Novels So I Try To Catch Up In-between.

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

Children Are The Vessels Into Which Adults Pour Their Poison.

Every Day Is For The Thief, By Turns Funny, Mournful, And Acerbic, Offers A Portrait Of Nigeria In Which Anger, Perhaps The Most Natural Response To The Often Lamentable State Of Affairs There, Is Somehow Muted And Deflected By The Author's Deep Engagement With The Country: A Profoundly Disenchanted Love. Teju Cole Is Among The Most Gifted Writers Of His Generation.

As A Writer, One Of The Things We All Learned From The Movies Was A Kind Of Compression That Didn't Exist Before People Were Used To Watching Films. For Instance, If You Wanted To Write A Flashback In A Novel, You Once Had To Really Contextualize It A Lot, To Set It Up. Now, Readers Know Exactly What You're Doing. Close-ups, Too.

I Didn't Want To Become Some Embittered Old Hack Getting His Revenge For The Rest Of My Life. And I Didn't Want To Become Some Scared Creature Cowering In A Corner. I Remember Telling Myself Not To Carry The Hatred Around, Although I Know Where It Is. I Have It In A Trunk In Storage.

Only The Foolish, Blinded By Language's Conventions, Think Of Fire As Red Or Gold. Fire Is Blue At It's Melancholy Rim, Green In It's Envious Heart. It May Burn White, Or Even, In It's Greatest Rages, Black.

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.

What Kind Of Idea Are You? Are You The Kind That Compromises, Does Deals, Accomodates Itself To Society, Aims To Find A Niche, To Survive; Or Are You The Cussed, Bloody-minded, Ramrod-backed Type Of Damnfool Notion That Would Rather Break Than Sway With The Breeze? – The Kind That Will Almost Certainly, Ninety-nine Times Out Of Hundred, Be Smashed To Bits; But, The Hundredth Time, Will Change The World.

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.

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