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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.

-Salman Rushdie

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Vulnerability Of Artists Is

Salman Rushdie

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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.

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

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

I Fell Victim To The Temptation Of Every Autobiographer, To The Illusion That Since The Past Exists Only In One's Memories And The Words Which Strive Vainly To Encapsulate Them, It Is Possible To Create Past Events Simply By Saying They Occurred.

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.

What I Do Think Is Evident Is That Those Countries In The World Where Islamic Extremism Has Recovered The Most Power, Those Are Also The Countries Which Are Most Disliked.

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.

A Mature Society Understands That At The Heart Of Democracy Is Argument.

A Man Who Invents Himself Needs Someone To Believe In Him... Not Only The Need To Be Believed In, But The Need To Believe In Another. You've Got It: Love.

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.

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

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

What You Were Is Forever Who You Are.

I Have No Problem With People's Religious Beliefs. I Just Don't Happen To Have Any.

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

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

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.

Is Birth Always A Fall?

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

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

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.

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.

When You Write You In A Way Write Out Of What You Think Of As Your Best Self, The Part Of You That Is Lacking In Foibles And Weaknesses And Egotism And Vanities And So On. You're Just Trying To Really Say Something As Truthful As You Can Out Of The Best That You Have In You.

To Respect Louis Farrakhan, We Must Understand, Is Simply To Agree With Him... If Dissent Is Now Also To Be Thought Of As A Form Of 'dissing,' Then We Have Indeed Succumbed To The Thought Police.

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.

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.

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

Good Advice Is Rarer Than Rubies.

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.

We Were Language's Magpies By Nature, Stealing Whatever Sounded Bright And Shiny.

Only The Foolish, Blinded By Language's Conventions, Think Of Fire As Red Or Gold. Fire Is Blue At It's Melancholy Rim, Green In It's Envious Heart. It May Burn White, Or Even, In It's Greatest Rages, Black.

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

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

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

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

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

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 Do Not Read The Works Of Salman Rushdie, I Write Them. By The Time I Have Finished Writing Them All I Can Think Of Is Never Reading Them Again. It's So Deep, Your Involvement With A Book, That Once It's Finished, Then You Are Really Done With It.

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