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Two Things Form The Bedrock Of Any Open Society - Freedom Of Expression And Rule Of Law. If You Don't Have Those Things, You Don't Have A Free Country.

-Salman Rushdie

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Two Things Form The

Salman Rushdie

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Two Things Form The Bedrock Of Any Open Society - Freedom Of Expression And Rule Of Law. If You Don't Have Those Things, You Don't Have A Free Country.

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The Whole Story Of Migration And What That Has Done In Interconnecting The Planet Is Obviously Something I've Written About A Lot.

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

Sometimes You Find Your Voice By Trying To Write Like People, And Sometimes You Find It By Trying To Write Unlike People.

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

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

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.

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

It May Be Argued That The Past Is A Country From Which We Have All Emigrated, That Its Loss Is Part Of Our Common Humanity.

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.

Cruelty Is Not A Literary Value.

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

What Had Been (at The Beginning) No Bigger Than A Full Stop Had Expanded Into A Comma, A Word, A Sentence, A Paragraph, A Chapter; Now It Was Bursting Into More Complex Developments, Becoming, One Might Say, A Book - Perhaps An Encylopaedia - Even A Whole Language.

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.

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

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.

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've Never Yet Managed To Write A Novel Which Didn't Have An Indian Central Character.

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.

What Distinguishes A Great Artist From A Weak One Is First Their Sensibility And Tenderness; Second, Their Imagination, And Third, Their Industry.

I've Always Prided Myself On My Discipline As A Writer. I Do It Like A Job. I Get Up In The Morning And Go To My Desk.

Prophet Mohammed Would Have No Objection To The Satanic Verses.

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.

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

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.

My Heart Broke Open And History Fell In.

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.

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.

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

My Parents Gave Me The Gift Of Irreligion, Of Growing Up Without Bothering To Ask People What Gods They Held Dear, Assuming That In Fact, Like My Parents, They Weren't Interested In Gods, And That This Uninterest Was 'normal.' You May Argue That The Gift Was A Poisoned Chalice, But Even If So, That's A Cup From Which I'd Happily Drink Again.

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

Out-of-step Intellectuals Like Noam Chomsky And The Deceased Edward Said Have Often Been Dismissed As Crazy Extremists, 'anti-american,' And In Mr. Said's Case Even, Absurdly, As Apologists For Palestinian 'terrorism.'

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

English Language

Where There Is No Belief, There Is No Blasphemy.

I'm Not A Big Fan Of There Being Voiceovers In Movies. I Really Prefer It When The Film Tells It Story.

The People Suffering Most From The Taliban Were Afghans.

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

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

I've Been Worrying About God A Little Bit Lately... It Seems Like He's Been In A Bad Mood. And I Think It Has To Do With The Quality Of Lovers He's Been Getting.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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

Good Advice Is Rarer Than Rubies.

...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.

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

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

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.

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?

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.'

Children Are The Vessels Into Which Adults Pour Their Poison.

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

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.

You Can Find Shame In Every House, Burning In An Ashtray, Hanging Framed Upon A Wall, Covering A Bed. But Nobody Notices It Any More.

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

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.

Few Topographical Boundaries Can Rival The Frontiers Of The Mind.

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

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

In The Movies, The Writer Is Just The Servant, The Employee.

A Book Is Not Completed Till It's Read.

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.'

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.

The Act Of Migration Puts Into Crisis Everything About The Migrating Individual Or Group, Everything About Identity And Selfhood And Culture And Belief. So If This Is A Novel About Migration It Must Be That Act Of Putting In Question. It Must Perform The Crisis It Describes.

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.

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.

I'll Tell You What Divorce Hasn't Taught Me. It Didn't Teach Me Not To Get Married Again.

I Grew Up Kissing Books And Bread.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Go For Broke. Always Try And Do Too Much. Dispense With Safety Nets. Take A Deep Breath Before You Begin.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

‎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.

We Are The Storytelling Animal.

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.

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

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

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.

You Don't That Often See Writers Being Sought Out When There Are Matters Of Great Moment To Discuss. And I Think That's A Loss.

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

Raif Badawi's Is An Important Voice For All Of Us To Hear.

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.

American Literature Has Always Been Immigrant.

American Literature

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

We Must Agree On What Matters: Kissing In Public Places, Bacon Sandwiches, Disagreement, Cutting-edge Fashion, Literature, Generosity, Water, A More Equitable Distribution Of The World's Resources, Movies, Music, Freedom Of Thought, Beauty, Love.

I Hate Admitting That My Enemies Have A Point.

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

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.

You've Got A Generation Of Young Men - Almost All Are Young Men - In Situations Of Great Economic Hardship, Where They Don't Really Have Work. The Chances Of Them Making A Decent Life For Themselves, Of Making A Family, Living In A Kind Of Decent, Happy Way, Are Very, Very Remote. It's Very Hard For Them To Ever Even Have That As A Dream, So When People Are That Deprived Of The Ordinary Hope Of Human Beings, It Creates Anger. And That Anger Can Be Channeled By Unscrupulous Persons, Whether Secular Or Religious Leaders, And There's Been A Lot Of That.

The Novel Does Not Seek To Establish A Privileged Language But It Insists Upon The Freedom To Portray And Analyze The Struggle Between The Different Contestants For Such Privileges.

I'm A Reader Of Chinese Literature, I Like Their Films, But Also: I've Had Great Difficulty Getting My Work Published In China; Very Little Of It Has Been Published There. The First Two Attempts To Have All Of My Work Published, For Instance, Were Refused Without Any Reason Ever Being Given.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

I'm No Friend Of Tony Blair's And I Consider The Middle East Policies Of The United States And The Uk Fatal.

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

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.

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.

Home Has Become Such A Scattered, Damaged, Various Concept In Our Present Travails. There Is So Much To Yearn For. There Are So Few Rainbows Any More.

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

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

Look At History. It's Not The Account Of A Species At Peace.

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.

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

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.

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.

It Is Often Said By Religious People That Without Its Framework, There Is No Sense Of Right Or Wrong. My View Is That Religion Comes After Ethics.

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

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

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 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.

The Thing About Literature Is That, Yes, There Are Kind Of Tides Of Fashion, You Know; People Come In And Out Of Fashion; Writers Who Are Very Celebrated Fall Into, You Know, People You Know Stop Reading Them, And Then It Comes Back Again.

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

I Learned: The First Lesson Of My Life: Nobody Can Face The World With His Eyes Open All The Time.

If I Had Simply Wanted To Trade On An Insult To Islam, I Could Have Done It In A Sentence Rather Than Writing A 250,000-word Novel, A Work Of Fiction.

I Have To Say That After Some Initial Resistance, I'm Now A Complete 'game Of Thrones' Addict.

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

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.

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

Perhaps The Story You Finish Is Never The One You Begin.

Of Course, There Is Nothing Intrinsic Linking Any Religion With Any Act Of Violence. The Crusades Don't Prove That Christianity Was Violent. The Inquisition Doesn't Prove That Christianity Tortures People. But That Christianity Did Torture People.

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

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

What Kind Of A God Is It That's Upset By A Cartoon In Danish?

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

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

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.

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

We Crave Permission Openly To Become Our Secret Selves.

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

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

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?

Don't You Know Girls Have To Fool People Every Day Of Their Lives If They Want To Get Anywhere?

Perhaps Because My Relationship With My Father Went Through Such A Long, Bumpy Time, It's Been Very Important For Me To Work To Try To Keep Lines Of Communication Open Between My Sons And Myself To Try To Avoid My Father's Mistakes. At Least If You're Making Mistakes, Make Different Mistakes.

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.

The Desire For Story Is Very, Very Deep In Human Beings. We Are The Only Creature In The World That Does This; We Are The Only Creature That Tells Stories, And Sometimes Those Are True Stories And Sometimes Those Are Made Up Stories. Then There Are The Larger Stories, The Grand Narratives That We Live In, Which Are Things Like Nation And Family And Clan And So On. Those Stories Are Considered To Be Treated Reverentially. They Need To Be Part Of The Way In Which We Conduct The Discourse Of Our Lives And To Prevent People From Doing Something Very Damaging To Human Nature.

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

If Islam Is To Be Reconciled With Modernity, These Voices Must Be Encouraged Until They Swell Into A Roar.

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

Realism Can Break A Writer's Heart.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Positive Atheism

What's The Use Of Stories That Aren't Even True?

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.

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

In Iran, Fundamentalism Was Fuelled To An Extent By The Regime Of The Shah Being Supported By The West.

What Can't Be Cured Must Be Endured.

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

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.

There Is Nothing Like A War For The Reinvention Of Lives.

I Didn't Become A Writer To Write About Me.

To Be Born Again,' Sang Gibreal Farishta Tumbling From The Heaveans, 'first You Have To Die. Ho Ji! Ho Ji! To Land Upon The Bosomy Earth, First One Needs To Fly Tat-taa! Takatun! How To Ever Smile Again, If First You Won't Cry? How To Win The Darling's Love Mister, Without A Sigh?

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

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

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.

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

It Matters, It Always Matters, To Name Rubbish As Rubbish; That To Do Otherwise Is To Legitimize It.

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

Difficult Relationship

Free-form Games In Which The Player Can Make Choices About What The Game Is Going To Be, Become A Kind Of Gaming Equivalent Of The Narrative Possibility.

I Think The Veil Is A Way Of Taking Power Away From Women.

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?

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

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

The Point Is Always Reached After Which The Gods No Longer Share Their Lives With Mortal Men And Women, They Die Or Wither Away Or Retire... Now That They've Gone, The High Drama's Over. What Remains Is Ordinary Human Life.

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Muammar Al-Gaddafi

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