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There's Going To Be No More Compromise On Issues Where There Should Not Be Compromise. Enough With Appeasement Or Apology And Mollifying, All That. To Hell With All That. I'm Just Going To Fight My Corner.

-Salman Rushdie

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There's Going To Be

Salman Rushdie

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There's Going To Be No More Compromise On Issues Where There Should Not Be Compromise. Enough With Appeasement Or Apology And Mollifying, All That. To Hell With All That. I'm Just Going To Fight My Corner.

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

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Broad-mindedness Is Related To Tolerance; Open-mindedness Is The Sibling Of Peace.

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

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.

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

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.

There Was A Series Called 'game Of Thrones' Which Was Very Popular Here In The United States, A Post-tolkien Kind Of Thing. It Was Garbage, Yet Very Addictive Garbage - Because There's Lots Of Violence, All The Women Take Their Clothes Off All The Time, And It's Kind Of Fun.

Peace, Perfect Peace, In This Dark World Of Sin? The Blood Of Jesus Whispers Peace Within.

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

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

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.

History Of Life

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.

One Of The Things I've Learnt Is Not To Depend On There Being A Woman In Your Life To Make It Work. I Love My Work, I Love My Children, I've Got Wonderful Friends, You Know, I Have A Nice Life.

Wonderful Friends

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.

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

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

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

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The Suicide Bomber's Imagination Leads Him To Believe In A Brilliant Act Of Heroism, When In Fact He Is Simply Blowing Himself Up Pointlessly And Taking Other People's Lives.

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When I Was Writing The Satanic Verses, If You Had Asked Me About The Phenomenon That We All Now Know As Radical Islam, I Wouldn't Have Had Much To Say. As Recently As The Mid-1980s, It Didn't Seem To Be A Big Deal.

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.

Madame Bovary And A Flying Carpet, They Are Both Untrue In The Same Way. Somebody Made Them Up.

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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.'

What Can't Be Cured Must Be Endured.

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

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.

Our Lives Are Not What We Deserve; They Are, Let Us Agree, In Many Ways Deficient.

I Think The Business Of Writing A Great Deal Of It Is The Business Of Paying Attention To Your Characters, To The World They Live In, To The Story You Have To Tell, But Just A Kind Of Deep Attention And Out Of That If You Pay Attention Properly The Story Will Tell You What It Needs.

Airport Security Exists To Guard Us Against Terrorist Attacks.

Airport Security

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.

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.

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

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

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

I've Never Rejected The World I Came From. To Be Rejected By It Is Horrible.

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.

And At The End Of The Day, There Was An Attempt To Suppress A Book. The Book Wasn't Suppressed. It's Freely Available In Whatever It Is, Close To 50 Languages. There Was An Attempt To Suppress The Writer. And I'm Happy To Say The Writer Wasn't Suppressed.

The End Of The Day

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.

Freedom To Reject Is The Only Freedom.

For Every Snake, There Is A Ladder; For Every Ladder,a Snake

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.

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.

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.

My Father Decided That He Was Such A Admirer Of Ibn Rushd's Philosophy, Thinking That He Changed The Family Name To Rushdie. I Realized Why My Father Was So Interested In Him, Because He Was Really An Incredibly Modernizing Voice Inside Our Islamic Culture.

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.

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

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

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.

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