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We Look Up And We Hope The Stars Look Down, We Pray That There May Be Stars For Us To Follow, Stars Moving Across The Heavens And Leading Us To Our Destiny, But It's Only Our Vanity. We Look At The Galaxy And Fall In Love, But The Universe Cares Less About Us Than We Do About It, And The Stars Stay In Their Courses However Much We May Wish Upon Them To Do Otherwise. It's True That If You Watch The Sky-wheel Turn For A While You'll See A Meteor Fall, Flame And Die. That's Not A Star Worth Following; It's Just An Unlucky Rock. Our Fates Are Here On Earth. There Are No Guiding Stars.

-Salman Rushdie

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Salman Rushdie

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We Look Up And We Hope The Stars Look Down, We Pray That There May Be Stars For Us To Follow, Stars Moving Across The Heavens And Leading Us To Our Destiny, But It's Only Our Vanity. We Look At The Galaxy And Fall In Love, But The Universe Cares Less About Us Than We Do About It, And The Stars Stay In Their Courses However Much We May Wish Upon Them To Do Otherwise. It's True That If You Watch The Sky-wheel Turn For A While You'll See A Meteor Fall, Flame And Die. That's Not A Star Worth Following; It's Just An Unlucky Rock. Our Fates Are Here On Earth. There Are No Guiding Stars.

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Falling In Love

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

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.

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

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

Matthew Wiener On Mad Men Writes The Entire Series Before They Start Shooting, And If You Have That, Then What You Can Do With Character And Story Is Not At All Unlike What You Can Do In A Novel.

Everything Has Shape, If You Look For It. There Is No Escape From Form.

It Just Requires So Much Of You, And Most Of The Time You Feel Dumb.

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

Free Speech Is The Whole Thing, The Whole Ball Game. Free Speech Is Life Itself.

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.

My Horizon's Have Shrunk And I Have Only Endings To Write.

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.

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

The West Should Be Tougher On Pakistan. It Is Trying To Play Both Ends Against The Middle - To Look Like The Friend Of The Revolutionaries On The One Hand And A Friend Of The West In The Fight Against Terrorism. It Can't Be Both Things.

I Grew Up Falling In Love With Kind Of Story, Amazing, Wonder Tale Of The East, Which If You're A Child Growing Up In India Is All Around You.and I Think One Of The Gifts It Gave Me As A Writer Was This Early Knowledge That Stories Are Not True.

Falling In Love

A Book Is A Product Of A Pact With The Devil That Inverts The Faustian Contract, He'd Told Allie. Dr Faustus Sacrificed Eternity In Return For Two Dozen Years Of Power; The Writer Agrees To The Ruination Of His Life, And Gains (but Only If He's Lucky) Maybe Not Eternity, But Posterity, At Least. Either Way (this Was Jumpy's Point) It's The Devil Who Wins.

Language Is Courage: The Ability To Conceive A Thought, To Speak It, And By Doing So To Make It True.

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

The Usa Approach Looks Like Bullying Because It Is.

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

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

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

When...did It Become Irrational To Dislike Religion, Any Religion, Even To Dislike It Vehemently? When Did Reason Get Redescribed As Unreason? When Were The Fairy Stories Of The Superstitious Placed Above Criticism, Beyond Satire? A Religion Was Not A Race. It Was An Idea, And Ideas Stood (or Fell) Because They Were Strong Enough (or Too Weak) To Withstand Criticism, Not Because They Were Shielded From It. Strong Ideas Welcomed Dissent.

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

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.

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.

People Can Do Bad Things With Free Speech As Well As Good. You Have To Defend The Ku Klux Klan As Well As Martin Luther King. It's Like That. If You're Going To Defend The Principle, Then You Have To Defend People Who Use The Principle Badly.

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.

There Are Things You Break That Can't Be Put Back Together Again. And Kashmir May Be One Of Them.

Even When Things Are At Their Worst, There's A Little Voice In Your Head Saying, 'good Story!'

There Is No Such Thing As Perfect Security, Only Varying Levels Of Insecurity.

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.

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

Abraham Zogoiby Covered His Face That Night In August 1939 Because He Had Been Assailed By Fear, [...] A Sudden Apprehension That The Ugliness Of Life Might Defeat Its Beauty; That Love Did Not Make Lovers Invulnerable. Nevertheless, He Thought, Even If The World's Beauty And Love Were On The Edge Of Destruction, Theirs Would Still Be The Only Side To Be On; Defeated Love Would Still Be Love, Hate's Victory Would Not Make It Other Than It Was.

The Acceptance That All That Is Solid Has Melted Into The Air, That Reality And Morality Are Not Givens But Imperfect Human Constructs, Is The Point From Which Fiction Begins.

Music, Love, Death. Certainly A Triangle Of Sorts; Maybe Even An Eternal One. "the Only People Who Can See The Whole Picture," He Murmured, "are The Ones Who Step Out Of The Frame."

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

When You Know What You're Against You Have Taken The First Step To Discovering What You're For.

If You Take A Look At History, You Will Find That The Understanding Of What Is Good And Evil Has Always Existed Before The Individual Religions. The Religions Were Only Invented By People Afterwards, In Order To Express This Idea.

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Fundamentalists Of All Faiths Are The Fundamental Evil Of Our Time.

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

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A Book Is Not Completed Till It's Read.

When A Reader Falls In Love With A Book, It Leaves Its Essence Inside Him, Like Radioactive Fallout In An Arable Field, And After That There Are Certain Crops That Will No Longer Grow In Him, While Other, Stranger, More Fantastic Growths May Occasionally Be Produced.

Falling In Love

Names, Once They Are In Common Use, Quickly Become Mere Sounds, Their Etymology Being Buried, Like So Many Of The Earth's Marvels, Beneath The Dust Of Habit.

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.

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If The Culture Shifts, If People Think Differently About Women, The Art Will Shift, Too. You Can't Ask Art To Make Social Change. It's Not What It's For.

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

And Using That - The Birth Of A Religion, It Suggests That You Have Got Two Tests. You Have The Test Of Weakness. When You're Weak, Do You Compromise, Do You Bend, Do You Give In, Do You Accommodate? And Then The Test Of Strength. When You're Strong, Are You Merciful, Are You Generous, Or Are You Cruel?

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

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

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

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

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Airport Security Exists To Guard Us Against Terrorist Attacks.

Airport Security

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

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.

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

The Thing That I Think Was Very Brave Of My Younger Self Was That He Decided He Would Be An Idiot. Just Persevere. That Feels Brave To Me: Deciding That I'm Going To Damn Well Be This Person That I've Set My Heart On Being.

The Way You Write A Screenplay Is That You Close Your Eyes And Run The Movie In Your Head And Then You Write It Down.

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

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

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.'

If Bigots Behave Like Bigots, It's Not A Huge Surprise.

The First Amendment Defends All Forms Of Speech Including Hate Speech, Which Is Why Groups Like Ku Klux Klan Are Allowed To Utter Their Poisonous Remarks.

Hell Is Other People's Fantasies.

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.

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

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

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, Which Has Worked Time And Time Again With Pen.

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

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

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.

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

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

If You Look At Indian Movies, Every Time They Wanted An Exotic Locale, They Would Have A Dance Number In Kashmir. Kashmir Was India's Fairyland. Indians Went There Because In A Hot Country You Go To A Cold Place. People Would Be Entranced By The Sight Of Snow.

I Think The Book Is Less Emotional Than The Film. With The Film, The Emotions Are Much More Raw And In Front. In The Book, They Are Kind Of Ironized And Seen Through Comedy.

There Are Two Things In Indian History - One Is The Incredible Optimism And Potential Of The Place, And The Other Is The Betrayal Of That Potential - For Example, Corruption. Those Two Strands Intertwine Through The Whole Of Indian History, And Maybe Not Just Indian History.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

It's Fun To Read Things When You Don't Know All The Words. Even Children Love It... They Come Up Against Weird Words, And The Weird Words Excite Them.

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.

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

The Moment You Declare A Set Of Ideas To Be Immune From Criticism, Satire, Derision, Or Contempt, Freedom Of Thought Becomes Impossible.

Science Fiction Is Always A Vehicle For Ideas. It's The Form Which Allows Either Movies Or Books To Be An Exploration Of How We Should Live.

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.

'the Satanic Verses' Was Denied The Ordinary Life Of A Novel. It Became Something Smaller And Uglier: An Insult.

Whenever Someone Who Knows You Disappears, You Lose One Version Of Yourself. Yourself As You Were Seen, As You Were Judged To Be. Lover Or Enemy, Mother Or Friend, Those Who Know Us Construct Us, And Their Several Knowings Slant The Different Facets Of Our Characters Like Diamond-cutter's Tools. Each Such Loss Is A Step Leading To The Grave, Where All Versions Blend And End.

Before I Came To England, My Favorite Authors Were P. G. Wodehouse And Agatha Christie. I Used To Devour Both.

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.

Human Beings Do Not Perceive Things Whole; We Are Not Gods But Wounded Creatures, Cracked Lenses, Capably Only Of Fractured Perceptions. Partial Beings, In All The Senses Of That Phrase.

It Seems That The Right Of Freedom Of Speech That Was Enshrined In Numerous Constitutions Is Now Under Attack By Religious Institutions.

Freedom Of Speech

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

Rohinton Mistry's Celebrated Novel 'such A Long Journey' Was Pulled Off The Syllabus Of Mumbai University Because Local Extremists Objected To Its Content.

Good Advice Is Rarer Than Rubies.

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.

I Don't Think I've Ever Quite Grown Out Of It, Actually. There Was A Point Where I Could Recite Some Of Those Elvish Verses - Which I've Mercifully Forgotten. But I Can Still, If Really Pushed, Recite The Text Of The Inside Of The Ruling Ring In The Language Of Mordor.

The Accidents Of My Life Have Given Me The Ability To Make Stories In Which Different Parts Of The World Are Brought Together, Sometimes Harmoniously, Sometimes In Conflict, And Sometimes Both - Usually Both. The Difficulty In These Stories Is That If You Write About Everywhere You Can End Up Writing About Nowhere.

Sometimes Great, Banned Works Defy The Censor's Description And Impose Themselves On The World - 'ulysses,' 'lolita,' The 'arabian Nights.'

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

We Are The Only Animals That Tell Stories To Understand The World We Live In.

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.

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.

My Heart Broke Open And History Fell In.

A Little Bit Of One Story Joins Onto An Idea From Another, And Hey Presto, . . . Not Old Tales But New Ones. Nothing Comes From Nothing.

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

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.

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

Make As Much Racket As You Like People. Noise Is Life And An Excess Of Noise Is A Sign That Life Is Good. There Will Be Time For Us All To Be Quiet When We Are Safely Dead.

One Of The Reasons My Name Is Rushdie Is That My Father Was An Admirer Of Ibn Rush'd, The 12th Century Arab Philosopher Known As Averroes In The West. In His Time, He Was Making The Non-literalist Case For Interpreting The Koran.

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

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.

We Who Have Grown Up On A Diet Of Honour And Shame Can Still Grasp What Must Seem Unthinkable To People Living In The Aftermath Of The Death Of God And Of Tragedy: That Men Will Sacrifice Their Dearest Love On The Implacable Altars Of Their Pride.

It's True That The Human Body Is More Vulnerable Than The Products Of The Human Mind.

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

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.

We Crave Permission Openly To Become Our Secret Selves.

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.

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

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

Most Of What Matters In Your Life Takes Place In Your Absence.

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.

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

If The Creative Artist Worries If He Will Still Be Free Tomorrow, Then He Will Not Be Free Today.

‎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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

All Art Began As Sacred Art, You Know? I Mean, All Painting Began As Religious Painting. All Writing Began As Religious Writing.

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.

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.

I Have Always Thought, The Secret Purpose Of The Book Tour Is To Make The Writer Hate The Book He's Written. And, As A Result, Drive Him To Write Another Book.

Our Lives Teach Us Who We Are.

I'm Not A Very Big Fan Of 'slumdog Millionaire.' I Think It's Visually Brilliant. But I Have Problems With The Story Line. I Find The Storyline Unconvincing.

Writers Have Been In Terrible Situations And Have Yet Managed To Produce Extraordinary Work.

At The Height Of The British Empire Very Few English Novels Were Written That Dealt With British Power. It's Extraordinary That At The Moment In Which England Was The Global Superpower The Subject Of British Power Appeared Not To Interest Most Writers.

But There's One Thing We Must All Be Clear About: Terrorism Is Not The Pursuit Of Legitimate Goals By Some Sort Of Illegitimate Means. Whatever The Murderers May Be Trying To Achieve, Creating A Better World Certainly Isn't One Of Their Goals. Instead They Are Out To Murder Innocent People.

If You Were Standing Next To The Prophet On The Mountain, Would You Have Seen The Archangel? And My Answer To That Was Probably Not, Even Though It's Supposed To Be A Really Big Archangel. He Describes It As - The Archangel Gabriel As Standing On The Horizon And Filling The Sky. That's A Big Angel.

If You're On A Freeway And Want To Know If You're Being Followed, What You Do Is Enormously Vary Your Speed. You Accelerate To 100 And Slow Down To 30 And Then Accelerate Again. In A City, You Make A Lot Of Turns Against The Stream Of Traffic. You Go Around A Roundabout Twice.

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.

We Are The Storytelling Animal.

The West Was Involved In Toppling The Mossadegh Government. That Ultimately Led To The Iranian Revolution.

It May Be That The Books That Were Best Liked In Your Lifetime Are Not The Ones That Are Best Liked 100 Years Later.

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.

Is Birth Always A Fall?

What You Were Is Forever Who You Are.

The Frustrating Part Of Being Tagged 'controversial' Is People Go Looking For Trouble Where There Isn't Any To Look For.

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

When You Are Writing A Book, It Feels As If You Are Simply Concentrating On The World Of The Book And That Whatever Is Happening In Your Personal Life Is Outside The Room, As It Were. But Maybe That's Just The Way You Have To Talk To Yourself To Make It Possible.

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.

When I'm Writing A Book, Sentence By Sentence, I'm Not Thinking Theoretically. I'm Just Trying To Work Out The Story From Inside The Characters I've Got.

I've Never Had Very High Regard For Therapists. I Owe My Health, My Mental Survival, To My Friends And Loved Ones.

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.

Where There Is No Belief, There Is No Blasphemy.

Prophet Mohammed Would Have No Objection To The Satanic Verses.

The Christian Coalition Is Still About Christianity, Even If It's An Idea Of Christianity That Many Christians Might Not Go Along With.

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

A Man Is Sane Only To The Extent That He Subscribes To A Previously-agreed Construction Of Reality.

Some People Are Paralyzed By The Consciousness Of Death, Other People Live With It.... The Fatwa Certainly Made Me Think About It A Lot More Than I Ever Had. I Guess I Know I'm Going To Die, But Then, So Are You.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Original Thought, Original Artistic Expression Is By Its Very Nature Questioning, Irreverent, Iconoclastic.

Original Thought

It Is Very, Very Easy Not To Be Offended By A Book. You Just Have To Shut It.

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