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The Real Risks For Any Artist Are Taken In Pushing The Work To The Limits Of What Is Possible, In The Attempt To Increase The Sum Of What It Is Possible To Think. Books Become Good When They Go To This Edge And Risk Falling Over It -when They Endanger The Artist By Reason Of What He Has, Or Has Not, Artistically Dared.

-Salman Rushdie

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The Real Risks For

Salman Rushdie

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The Real Risks For Any Artist Are Taken In Pushing The Work To The Limits Of What Is Possible, In The Attempt To Increase The Sum Of What It Is Possible To Think. Books Become Good When They Go To This Edge And Risk Falling Over It -when They Endanger The Artist By Reason Of What He Has, Or Has Not, Artistically Dared.

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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.

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

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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 Teach Us Who We Are.

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

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.

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

I Saw Quentin Tarantino's 'django Unchained,' And You Could Say A Lot Of Things Against It, But It Was Incredible Fun. I Don't Like Blood And Gore And I Am Very Squeamish About Violence, But Tarantino's Violence Is Actually Funny.

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Native American

The Gamble Of Literature Is That I Make The Best Work I Can; The Most Truthful, The Most Representative Of How I See Things. I Try And Do That And Then I Put It Out There And Say To You, "what Do You Think?" I Hope That You Think Well Of It, Obviously.

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

Reading Is A Very Different Thing Than Performing. In Fact, One Of The Things I Think That Doesn't Work In Books On Tape Is If The Person Doing The Reading "acts" Too Much; It Becomes Irritating To You Listening To It.

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.

Pakistan Is Alarmed By The Rising Indian Influence In Afghanistan, And Fears That An Afghanistan Cleansed Of The Taliban Would Be An Indian Client State, Thus Sandwiching Pakistan Between Two Hostile Countries. The Paranoia Of Pakistan About India's Supposed Dark Machinations Should Never Be Underestimated.

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.

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

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.

When You're Writing For The Screen, You Have To Be Hyper-conscious Every Moment Of How The Audience Is Going To React. If You Write Just One Scene Where The Audience Is Confused Or It Breaks Their Concentration In Some Way, Then You've Lost Them, And You Might Never Get Them Back.

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

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

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

I Grew Up Kissing Books And Bread.

I'm Definitely Post-something.

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'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.

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.

She's No Flibberti-gibberti Mamzell, But A Whir-stir-get-lost-sir Bundla Dynamite!

I Know Who I Am, I Know What I'm For, And I Know What I'm Willing To Fight For.

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

Prophet Mohammed Would Have No Objection To The Satanic Verses.

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

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

Freedom Is Not A Tea Party, India. Freedom Is A War.

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.

If You Have Children You Worry About The World You're Leaving Them.

I Don't Think There Really Is Much Of A Left In America, Certainly By European Standards Even The Left Is Quite Right Wing Here.

So When I Studied History At Cambridge, I Did A Special Subject In That, Exactly That. And Then Actually That - While I Was Studying It Was Where I Came Across The So-called Incident Of The Satanic Verses.

From The Beginning Men Used God To Justify The Unjustifiable.

I Was Very Happy In Bombay. I Was Good At School. There Was No Reason To Change Anything. I Suppose It Must Have Been Some Spirit Of Adventure, Of Wanting To See The World.

I Discovered That If You Find The Language To Talk To Younger Readers, Children Can Accept Anything.

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

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.'

You Can Adhere To Your Faith, But That Faith Needs To March In Line With The Rest Of The World And Needs To Find A Way Of Expressing Itself In The Modern World.

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Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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