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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.

-Salman Rushdie

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The Pen/barbara Goldsmith Freedom

Salman Rushdie

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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.

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The Question I'm Always Asking Myself Is: Are We Masters Or Victims? Do We Make History, Or Does History Make Us? Do We Shape The World, Or Are We Just Shaped By It? The Question Of Do We Have Agency In Our Lives Or Whether We Are Just Passive Victims Of Events Is, I Think, A Great Question, And One That I Have Always Tried To Ask.

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

Doubt, It Seems To Me, Is The Central Condition Of A Human Being In The Twentieth Century.

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

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.

With Death Comes Honesty.

The People Suffering Most From The Taliban Were Afghans.

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.

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

Cruelty Is Not A Literary Value.

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.'

And So It Is They Who, Between Them, Give Me All The Reasons For Believing In None.

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.

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

Shame Is Like Everything Else; Live With It For Long Enough And It Becomes Part Of The Furniture.

Where There Is No Belief, There Is No Blasphemy.

I Do Think There Was A Period There When My Sanity Was Under Intense Pressure, And I Didn't Know What To Say Or Do Or How To Act. I Was Literally Living From Day To Day.

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

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.

Good Advice Is Rarer Than Rubies.

In An Ideal World, You Could Reunite The Pakistan-occupied Part Of Kashmir With The Indian-occupied Part And Restore The Old Borders. You Could Have Both India And Pakistan Agreeing To Guarantee Those Borders, Demilitarise The Area, And To Invest In It Economically. In A Sane World That Would Happen, But We Don't Live In A Sane World.

India And Pakistan

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.

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

Very Often In Free Speech Cases You Find Yourself Defending Material That You Personally Detest, Because Of Course It's No Trick To Defend The Free Speech Of People You Either Agree With Or Who Don't Particularly Upset You. It's When People Really Upset You That You Discover If You Believe In Free Speech Or Not.

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

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.

All Names Mean Something.

We Live In An Age Where The Rate Of Change Has Been Colossal. Colossal. Almost Every Week There's Some Transformation Of Some Kind, Whether Technological Or Political Or Scientific, Whatever. And I Think It's Bewildering To Human Beings To Live In A Time When They Can't Take Anything As Fixed - When Everything Is Shifting And Changing All The Time.

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

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.'

This May Be The Curse Of Human Race . Not That We Are Different From One Anther , But We Are So Alike .

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

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

Religion, A Mediaeval Form Of Unreason, When Combined With Modern Weaponry Becomes A Real Threat To Our Freedoms. This Religious Totalitarianism Has Caused A Deadly Mutation In The Heart Of Islam And We See The Tragic Consequences In Paris Today.

[...] 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 Tension, Dissent, Friction. Free People Strike Sparks, And Those Sparks Are The Best Evidence Of Freedom's Existence.

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?

You Can't Have Modern States Based On Ideas Which Have Been Out Of Date For A Thousand Years.

Few Topographical Boundaries Can Rival The Frontiers Of The Mind.

Everest Silences You...when You Come Down, Nothing Seems Worth Saying, Nothing At All. You Find The Nothingness Wrapping You Up, Like A Sound. Non-being. You Can't Keep It Up, Of Course. The World Rushes In Soon Enough. What Shuts You Up Is, I Think, The Sight You've Had Of Perfection: Why Speak If You Can't Manage Perfect Thoughts, Perfect Sentences? It Feels Like A Betrayal Of What You've Been Through. But It Fades; You Accept That Certain Compromises, Closures, Are Required If You're To Continue.

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

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

‎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.

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

If You Listen To The Urban Speech Patterns There You'll Find It's Quite Characteristic That A Sentence Will Begin In One Language, Go Through A Second Language And End In A Third. It's The Very Playful, Very Natural Result Of Juggling Languages. You Are Always Reaching For The Most Appropriate Phrase.

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

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.

It Is Very, Very Easy Not To Be Offended By A Book. You Just Have To Shut It.

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

Stories In Families Are Colossally Important. Every Family Has Stories: Some Funny, Some Proud, Some Embarrassing, Some Shameful. Knowing Them Is Proof Of Belonging To The Family.

A Book Is A Version Of The World. If You Do Not Like It, Ignore It; Or Offer Your Own Version In Return.

Life Is Elsewhere. Cross Frontiers. Fly Away.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I Think It's A Very Important Function Of Art To Challenge Accepted Reality, Especially When That Reality Is Created By Powerful Interest Groups.

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

We Are The Storytelling Animal.

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.

Optimism Is A Disease

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

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.

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

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

What Kind Of Christmas Present Would Jesus Ask Santa For?

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.

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.

Whenever Someone Who Knows You Disappears, You Lose One Version Of Yourself. Yourself As You Were Seen, As You Were Judged To Be. Lover Or Enemy, Mother Or Friend, Those Who Know Us Construct Us, And Their Several Knowings Slant The Different Facets Of Our Characters Like Diamond-cutter's Tools. Each Such Loss Is A Step Leading To The Grave, Where All Versions Blend And End.

Not All Possibilities Are Open To Us. The World Is Finite; Our Hopes Spill Over Its Rim.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

The Thing That Always Attracted Me To New York Was The Sense Of Being In A Place Where A Lot Of People Had A Lot Of Stories Not Unlike Mine,' Rushdie Says. 'everybody Comes From Somewhere Else. Everyone's Got A Polish Grandmother, Some Kind Of Metamorphosis In Their Family Circumstances. That's A Very Big Thing - The Experience Of Not Living Where You Started.

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.

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

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.

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

...in Words And Pickles, I Have Immortalized My Memories, Although Distortions Are Inevitable In Both Methods. We Must Live, I'm Afraid, With The Shadows Of Imperfections.

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.

When You Are Making An Independent Film, Money Is Never An Issue.

What I Worry About And Don't Like Is The Way In Which The Ideology Of Multiculturalism Has Declined Into Cultural Relativism. I Think That's Very Dangerous. When The Archbishop Of Canterbury, For God's Sake, Says That You Can't Have One Law For Everybody... That's Stupid.

One Of The Extraordinary Things About Human Events Is That The Unthinkable Becomes Thinkable.

Extraordinary Things

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

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

Difficult Relationship

My Heart Broke Open And History Fell In.

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

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.

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 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.

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 Dictate To Anyone What To Believe And What Not To. And I Don't Want That To Be Dictated To Me Either.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

The Way You Write A Screenplay Is That You Close Your Eyes And Run The Movie In Your Head And Then You Write It Down.

You Don't Fight Radical Conservatism With Not-quite-so Radical Conservatism.

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

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.

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

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.

No Story Comes From Nowhere; New Stories Are Born From Old.

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

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.

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.

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.

We Crave Permission Openly To Become Our Secret Selves.

I Have Been Only The Humblest Jugglers-with-facts; And That, In A Country Where The Truth Is What It Is Instructed To Be, Reality Quite Literally Ceases To Exist, So That Everything Becomes Possible Except What We Are Told Is The Case; And Maybe This Was The Difference Between My Indian Childhood And Pakistani Adolescence--that In The First I Was Beset By An Infinity Of Alternative Realities, While In The Second I Was Adrift, Disoriented, Amid An Equally Infinite Number Of Falsenesses, Unrealities And Lies.

Someone Asked Me If I Was Afraid To Write My Memoirs. I Told Him: 'we Have To Stop Drawing Up Accounts Of Fear! We Live In A Society In Which People Are Allowed To Tell Their Story, And That Is What I Do.'

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

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

If You're Offended, It's Your Problem.

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

There Is No Alternative To The Peaceful Coexistence Of Cultures.

One Of The Strange Things About Violent And Authoritarian Regimes Is They Don't Like The Glare Of Negative Publicity. If You Can Make Them Sufficiently Uncomfortable, They Frequently Respond By Doing What You Need Them To Do In The Spirit Of Setting People Free Or Ceasing Arrests, Which Has Worked Time And Time Again With Pen.

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

I Have Always Thought That These Two Ways Of Talking, One Is The Fantastic, The Fable, The Fairy Tale, And The Other Being History, The Scholarly Study Of What Happened, I Think They're Both Amazing Ways To Understand Human Nature.

In General, Writers Shouldn't Be Killed For What They Write, Though I Can Think Of Exceptions.

It's True That The Human Body Is More Vulnerable Than The Products Of The Human Mind.

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.

If You Want To Draw People Into The Story, You Really Have To Write As If You're Writing A Novel And Make These Actually-existing People, Including The Actually-existing Person With My Name, Into A Believable Person On The Page. And That Requires Distance. That Requires Not Being Right Up Against The Events You're Talking About.

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

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 Did A Lot Of Student Acting When I Was Young.

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.

It's One Thing To Say, 'i Don't Like What You Said To Me And I Find It Rude And Offensive,' But The Moment You Threaten Violence In Return, You've Taken It To Another Level, Where You Lose Whatever Credibility You Had.

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

Chekhov Is This Poet Of Melancholy And Isolation And Of Wishing You Were Somewhere Else Than Where You Are.

Is Birth Always A Fall?

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.

Names, Once They Are In Common Use, Quickly Become Mere Sounds, Their Etymology Being Buried, Like So Many Of The Earth's Marvels, Beneath The Dust Of Habit.

If I Were Dead, Then Nobody In England Would Have To Fuss About The Cost Of My Security And Whether Or Not I Merited Such Special Treatment For So Long.

I've Never Had Very High Regard For Therapists. I Owe My Health, My Mental Survival, To My Friends And Loved Ones.

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.

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

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

This Was An Age Before E-books. We All Knew That The Only Way You Can Allow A Book To Survive In Print In The Long Term Is In Paperback. The Hardback Has A Certain Life, And Then It Stops Having That. It Stops Selling, And If You Want The Book To Just Stay Around There Has To Be A Paperback Edition. So If There Were Not A Paperback Edition The Book Would Eventually Disappear From The Shelves, And We Would Have Lost The Battle.

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

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.

If There Were Israeli Attacks On Iranian Nuclear Facilities, It Makes It Certain There Would Be A Reprisal Attack Against The United States At Some Point.

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

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.

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.

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

The Liveliness Of Literature Lies In Its Exceptionality, In Being The Individual, Idiosyncratic Vision Of One Human Being, In Which, To Our Delight And Great Surprise, We May Find Our Own Vision Reflected.

Children Are The Vessels Into Which Adults Pour Their Poison.

In The End, You Write The Book That Grabs You By The Throat And Demands To Be Written.

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.

I Needed My Stuff Around Me, And In That Little Cocoon I Felt Good, And I Could Work.

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.

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.

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

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.

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."

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

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

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.

Reality Is A Question Of Perspective; The Further You Get From The Past, The More Concrete And Plausible It Seems - But As You Approach The Present, It Inevitably Seems More And More Incredible.

How To Forgive The World For Its Beauty, Which Merely Disguises Its Ugliness; For Its Gentleness, Which Merely Cloaks Its Cruelty; For Its Illusion Of Continuity, Seamlessly, As The Night Follows The Day, So To Speak- Whereas In Reality Life Is A Series Of Brutal Raptures, Falling Upon Your Defenseless Hands, Like The Blows Of A Woodman's Axe?

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

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

When You're Writing For The Screen You're Really Thinking All The Time Of What You Have To Do To Make Sure That They Have The Information That They Need, That The Emotional Thread Is Not Snapped, That The Story Moves At The Right Speed, To Keep The Audience Hopefully Sitting On The Edge Of Their Seats Or Else Weeping Or Laughing.

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.

I Have Had Many More Close Women Friends Than Men, And I've Always Assumed That Comes From The Fact That In My Family There Was Such A Disproportionate Female Element.

Language Is Courage: The Ability To Conceive A Thought, To Speak It, And By Doing So To Make It True.

Without Water We Are Nothing", The Traveler Thought. "even An Emperor, Denied Water, Would Swiftly Turn To Dust. Water Is The Real Monarch And We Are All Its Slaves.

India Is My Kid Sister.

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.

The History Of A Culture Can Be Determined By Its Untranslatable Words.

Thought I Was Doing Two Things. One Is Inquiring Into The Phenomenon Of Revelation, If You Are Not A Religious Person. But, Clearly, It's A Sincere Phenomenon.

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.

Actually, I Don't Even Like Parties. I Would Much Prefer A Room With Four Friends Who Sit Around And Have Dinner. I Detest Nightclubs. And I Don't Like Places Where The Noise Is So Loud You Can't Talk To People.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Free Speech Is Life Itself.

Discovery Is Fun. I Am Incredibly Open To Everything.

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

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

Liberate Yourself, Because No One Else Is Going To Liberate You

Gym Motivational

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

Vulnerability Of Artists Is Definitely What Makes Organizations Like Pen Necessary Because, As I Tried To Argue, The Actual Work That Writers And Artists Do Has An Ornery Way Of Surviving. Particularly In This Age Of The Internet, It Is Very Easy For Forbidden Work To Be Found Online Somewhere If You Know Where To Look. Artists Themselves, However, Are In Increasing Danger, And Not Just Artists. The Great Concern Is That Year After Year, Rising Numbers Of Journalists Are Being Killed In Pursuit Of Their Work.

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

Too Many People Spouting Too Many Words, And In The End Those Words Will Turn To Bullets And Stones.

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Stanley Milgram

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