Background Image

...

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.

-Salman Rushdie

...

Please Wait....
Translating....

The Thing I Really

Salman Rushdie

...

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.

Views: 10

Topic

More From Salman Rushdie

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

Hell Is Other People's Fantasies.

Sometimes People Have Said That Islam, In Its Own Calendar, Is Still Only In The Middle Ages. It's Still In The Fifteenth Century Or Whatever. And Christianity In The Fifteenth Century, After All, Was Full Of Inquisitions And Burnings At The Stake, And So On And So On. So Give Islam Time, And It Will Reach The Point Of Maturity That Other Religions Have. But Mormonism Is Much Younger Than Islam, And It's Got There Already. So I Don't Think That's An Argument That Works.

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.

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.

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

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.

The Republicans Were Not Always Insane. They Might've Had Politics I Didn't Agree With, But They Weren't Always Actually Certifiable.

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

Many Men Start Being Friendly With Women Because They Are Trying To Seduce Them. I'm Not Trying To Seduce Them. I Just Like Hanging Out With Them.

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

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.

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.

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

Very Often, People Who Actually Pick Up A Book Of Mine For The First Time Are Kind Of Surprised. And I Get These Letters Saying, Well, Who Knew That You Were Good, You Know?

What Can't Be Cured Must Be Endured.

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.

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

All Names Mean Something.

Nobody Wants To Read A 600 Page Book In Which The Author Is Fabulous Throughout.

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.

England In A Way Is Lucky. It's An Island, So The Frontiers Are Given By The Sea.

The Sixty-minute Drama Form Has Become Very Rich.

It's So Disappointing, To Put It Mildly, That People Know So Much About My Life. Because It Means That They're Always Trying To Look At My Books In Terms Of My Life.

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

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

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.

With Death Comes Honesty.

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.

You Can't Assume If You Do Something Contentious That People Will Be On Your Side. The Moment Violence Enters The Story, The Story Changes. Then The Question Is, "how Do You Face Up To Violence?" And Then You Have To Have A No-compromise Position. And This Is Quite Simply A Lesson We Learn In The School Playground.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Children Are The Vessels Into Which Adults Pour Their Poison.

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

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

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

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.

My Heart Broke Open And History Fell In.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

I'd Wanted To Create A Storm So That I Could Become More Famous And Richer.

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.

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.

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

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

Nothing Comes From Nothing, Thieflet; No Story Comes From Nowhere; New Stories Are Born From Old--it Is The New Combinations That Make Them New.

I've Never Read Anything So Badly Written That Got Published. It Made 'twilight' Look Like 'war And Peace.'

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.

You Want All Your Books To Stick Around After You've Gone.

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.

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

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

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

Originality Is Dangerous. It Challenges, Questions, Overturns Assumptions, Unsettles Moral Codes.

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

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

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

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

India Is My Kid Sister.

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

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 Want More Than What I Want. (vina Apsara)

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.

Can One Drown In One's Element... If Fish Can Drown In Water, Can Human Beings Suffocate In Air?

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

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.

Literature Is The One Place In Any Society Where, Within The Secrecy Of Our Own Heads, We Can Hear Voices Talking About Everythingin Every Possible Way. The Reason For Ensuring That That Privileged Arena Is Preserved Is Not That Writers Want The Absolute Freedom To Say And Do Whatever They Please. It Is That We, All Of Us, Readers And Writers And Citizens And Generals And Goodmen, Need That Little, Unimportant-looking Room. We Do Not Need To Call It Sacred, But We Do Need To Remember That It Is Necessary.

I Have Been A Film Buff All My Life And Believe That The Finest Cinema Is Fully The Equal Of The Best Novels.

In The '50s, Listening To Elvis And Others On The Radio In Bombay - It Didn't Feel Alien. Noises Made By A Truck Driver From Tupelo, Mississippi, Seemed Relevant To A Middle-class Kid Growing Up On The Other Side Of The World. That Has Always Fascinated Me.

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.

The Response Of Anybody Interested In Liberty Is That We All Have A Say And The Ability To Have An Argument Is Exactly What Liberty Is, Even Though It May Never Be Resolved. In Any Authoritarian Society The Possessor Of Power Dictates, And If You Try And Step Outside He Will Come After You.

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.

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

The People Suffering Most From The Taliban Were Afghans.

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

English Language

Cruelty Is Not A Literary Value.

We Are The Storytelling Animal.

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.

I Hate Admitting That My Enemies Have A Point.

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

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.

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.

Games Sometimes Require Lateral Thinking. They Sometimes Require Quite Skilled Hand-eye Coordination And So On. But They're Not In Any Sense Intelligent In The Way That You Want Your Children To Develop Intelligence To Make The Mind Not Just Supple, But Actually Informed.

Whores And Writers, Mahound. We Are The People You Can't Forgive.

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.

How Do You Defeat Terrorism? Don’t Be Terrorized.

The Glamour Of Being Forbidden Must Not Be Underestimated.

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

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

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.

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

There Is No Alternative To The Peaceful Coexistence Of Cultures.

Why Obliterate The Exceptional Merely In Order To Make The Outstanding Look Finer Than It Was?

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.

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 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.

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 Think That England Made A Very Big, Historical Mistake To Allow Itself To Become The Kind Of Terrorist Capital Of The World.

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

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

Books Choose Their Authors; The Act Of Creation Is Not Entirely A Rational And Conscious One.

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.

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

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

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

We Crave Permission Openly To Become Our Secret Selves.

Such Is The Miraculous Nature Of The Future Of Exiles: What Is First Uttered In The Impotence Of An Overheated Apartment Becomes The Fate Of Nations.

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.

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 Have Never Really Thought Of Myself As A Writer About Religion. And I Think One Of The Things That Happened To Me As A Result Of All That Is That I Think It Did For Some People, Many People, Obscure The Kind Of Writer That I Actually Am.

All Migrants Leave Their Pasts Behind, Although Some Try To Pack It Into Bundles And Boxes-but On The Journey Something Seeps Out Of The Treasured Mementoes And Old Photographs, Until Even Their Owners Fail To Recognize Them, Because It Is The Fate Of Migrants To Be Stripped Of History, To Stand Naked Amidst The Scorn Of Strangers Upon Whom They See Rich Clothing, The Brocades Of Continuity And The Eyebrows Of Belonging.

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.

Free Speech Is Life Itself.

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.

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.

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.

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

I Reluctantly Concluded That There Was No Way For Me To Help Bring Into Being The Muslim Culture I'd Dreamed Of, The Progressive, Irreverent, Skeptical, Argumentative, Playful And Unafraid Culture Which Is What I've Always Understood As Freedom.... Actually Existing Islam ... Which Makes Literalism A Weapon And Redescription A Crime, Will Never Let The Likes Of Me In.

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

So Thomas Pynchon Wants A Private Life And No Photographs And Nobody To Know His Home Address. I Can Dig It, I Can Relate To That (but, Like, He Should Try It When It's Compulsory Instead Of A Free-choice Option).

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.

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.

Once You Get That Instinct For The Fictiveness, The Fictionality Of Fiction, It Kind Of Sets You Free.

We Must Conclude That It Is Not Only A Particular Political Ideology That Has Failed, But The Idea That Men And Women Could Ever Define Themselves In Terms That Exclude Their Spiritual Needs.

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

Difficult Relationship

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

Extraordinary Things

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.

If Woody Allen Were A Muslim, He'd Be Dead By Now.

Positive Atheism

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

The World Is Full Of Things That Upset People. But Most Of Us Deal With It And Move On And Don't Try And Burn The Planet Down.

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

I Remember When I Was Young, Many Cities In The Muslim World Were Cosmopolitan Cities With A Lot Of Culture.

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.

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

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 Beautiful Came To This City [hollywood] In Huge Pathetic Herds, To Suffer, To Be Humiliated, To See The Powerful Currency Of Their Beauty Devalued Like The Russian Ruble Or Argentine Peso;to Work As Bellhops, As Bar Hostesses, As Garbage Collectors, As Maids. The City Was A Cliff And They Were Its Stampeding Lemmings. At The Foot Of The Cliff Was The Valley Of The Broken Dolls.

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.

I Was 21 In 1968, So I'm As Much A Child Of The '60s As Is Possible To Be. In Those Years The Subject Of Religion Had Really Almost Disappeared; The Idea That Religion Was Going To Be A Major Force In The Life Of Our Societies, In The West Anyway, Would Have Seemed Absurd In 1968.

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

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.

After A Long, Hopeless War, People Will Settle For Peace, At Almost Any Price.

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.

But Love Is What We Want, Not Freedom. Who Then Is The Unluckier Man? The Beloved, Who Is Given His Heart's Desire And Must For Ever After Fear Its Loss, Or The Free Man, With His Unlooked-for Liberty, Naked And Alone Between The Captive Armies Of The Earth?

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

No, I Don't Think It's Fair To Label Islam 'violent.' But I Will Say That To My Knowledge, No Writer Has Ever Gone Into Hiding For Criticizing The Amish.

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.

Dissensions Between Muslim Nations Run At Least As Deep, If Not Deeper, Than Those Nations' Resentment Of The West.

A Figure Of Speech Is A Shifty Thing; It Can Be Twisted Or It Can Be Straight.

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

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.

Children Like Being A Little Scared, But They Don't Want To Be Disturbed.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.'

One Of The Things A Writer Is For Is To Say The Unsayable, Speak The Unspeakable And Ask Difficult Questions.

Difficult Questions

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.

A Relationship With An Imaginary Woman Is Preferable To A Relationship With A Real One.

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.

One Of The Things I Know From The Study Of History Is That History Surprises You. History Is Not Written. It's Not Inevitable.the Victory Of Evil Is Not Certain.

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

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

Reality Is A Question Of Perspective.

If There Is A Choice Between Absolute Safety And Freedom, Then Freedom Must Always Prevail.

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.

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

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.

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

One Of The Problems With Defending Free Speech Is You Often Have To Defend People That You Find To Be Outrageous And Unpleasant And Disgusting.

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

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.

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.

In The Experience Of Art, Time Seems Not To Exist. When I'm Writing And Think, "i've Been Working For Two Hours," I've Actually Been Working For Seven.

I Determined To Make My Peace With Islam, Even At The Cost Of My Pride. Those Who Were Surprised And Displeased By What I Did Perhaps Failed To See That ... I Wanted To Make Peace Between The Warring Halves Of The World, Which Were Also The Warring Halves Of My Soul.

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.

Prophet Mohammed Would Have No Objection To The Satanic Verses.

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

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

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

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.'

Trending Author

William McKinley

Jonny Greenwood

Category