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Well, We're Still In The Middle Of It. And It Doesn't Show Any Sign Of Going Away. And These Attacks That Were - That Seemed So Odd At The Time, With "satanic Verses," Because We Didn't Have Any Context For This. You Know, Where Did That Come From? It Seemed To Come Out Of Nowhere.

-Salman Rushdie

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Well, We're Still In

Salman Rushdie

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Well, We're Still In The Middle Of It. And It Doesn't Show Any Sign Of Going Away. And These Attacks That Were - That Seemed So Odd At The Time, With "satanic Verses," Because We Didn't Have Any Context For This. You Know, Where Did That Come From? It Seemed To Come Out Of Nowhere.

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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.

A Sigh Isn't Just A Sigh. We Inhale The World And Breathe Out Meaning. While We Can. While We Can.

Home Is The Place Where You Feel Happy.

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.

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.

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

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.

What One Writer Can Make In The Solitude Of One Room Is Something No Power Can Easily Destroy.

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.

I Am On Facebook, But Mainly As A Way To Spy On My Children. I Find Out More About Them From Their Facebook Pages Than From What They Tell Me.

I Can Walk Into A Bookshop And Point Out A Number Of Books That I Find Very Unattractive In What They Say. But It Doesn't Occur To Me To Burn The Bookshop Down. If You Don't Like A Book, Read Another Book. If You Start Reading A Book And You Decide You Don't Like It, Nobody Is Telling You To Finish It.

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

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

Your Blasphemy, Salman, Can't Be Forgiven. To Set Your Words Against The Words Of God.

I Know Who I Am, I Know What I'm For, And I Know What I'm Willing To Fight For.

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

Extraordinary Things

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.

It's Difficult Not To Color Our Perception Of Author's Product With His Personality. There Are So Many Examples Of This. What Do We Think Of Ezra Pound - Clearly A Great Poet And Clearly Kind Of An Asshole? You Can Say The Same Thing About Louis-ferdinand Céline, Who Clearly Was A Nazi Sympathizer, And Yet One Of The Great Writers Of The 20th Century. It Is Tough, But There Are Enough Examples Around Where We Have To Somehow Find A Way Of Separating The Work From The Artist And Seeing What There Is To See In The Work, While Also Condemning The Thoughts We See In The Man.

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.

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

Be Sure That You Go To The Author To Get At His Meaning, Not To Find Yours.

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

Now I Know What A Ghost Is. Unfinished Business, That's What.

Unfinished Business

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.

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.

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

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

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.

How Does Newness Come Into The World? How Is It Born? Of What Fusions, Translations, Conjoinings Is It Made? How Does It Survive, Extreme And Dangerous As It Is? What Compromises, What Deals, What Betrayals Of Its Secret Nature Must It Make To Stave Off The Wrecking Crew, The Exterminating Angel, The Guillotine? Is Birth Always A Fall? Do Angels Have Wings? Can Men Fly?

Reading Is A Very Different Thing Than Performing. In Fact, One Of The Things I Think That Doesn't Work In Books On Tape Is If The Person Doing The Reading "acts" Too Much; It Becomes Irritating To You Listening To It.

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.

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

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

From The Beginning Men Used God To Justify The Unjustifiable.

Shame Is Like Everything Else; Live With It For Long Enough And It Becomes Part Of The Furniture.

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.

Religion Is Responsible For A Lot Of The Problems In The History Of The World And It's Not Something That I Practice Or Recommend, But To Each His Own.

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

Original Thought

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

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.

Optimism Is A Disease

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

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

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

Well, We're Still In The Middle Of It. And It Doesn't Show Any Sign Of Going Away. And These Attacks That Were - That Seemed So Odd At The Time, With "satanic Verses," Because We Didn't Have Any Context For This. You Know, Where Did That Come From? It Seemed To Come Out Of Nowhere.

It's Obvious That I Come Down On The Side Of Free Speech For Anybody's Work.

Unless, Of Course, There's No Such Thing As Chance;...in Which Case, We Should Either-optimistically-get Up And Cheer, Because If Everything Is Planned In Advance, Then We All Have A Meaning And Are Spared The Terror Of Knowing Ourselves To Be Random, Without A Why; Or Else, Of Course, We Might-as Pessimists-give Up Right Here And Now, Understanding The Futility Of Thought Decision Action, Since Nothing We Think Makes Any Difference Anyway, Things Will Be As They Will. Where, Then, Is Optimism? In Fate Or In Chaos?

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.

Discovery Is Fun. I Am Incredibly Open To Everything.

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.

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

If You're Going To Write A Memoir, Try To Be As Honest And Open As You Can.

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

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.

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

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.

Rock And Roll Music - The Music Of Freedom Frightens People And Unleashes All Manner Of Conservative Defense Mechanisms.

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

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.

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.

The Problem's Name Is God.

To Put It As Simply As Possible: I Am Not A Muslim.[...] I Do Not Accept The Charge Of Apostacy, Because I Have Never In My Adult Life Affirmed Any Belief, And What One Has Not Affirmed One Can Not Be Said To Have Apostasized From. The Islam I Know States Clearly That 'there Can Be No Coercion In Matters Of Religion'. The Many Muslims I Respect Would Be Horrified By The Idea That They Belong To Their Faith Purely By Virtue Of Birth, And That A Person Who Freely Chose Not To Be A Muslim Could Therefore Be Put To Death.

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.

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.

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

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.

I Don't Think There Really Is Much Of A Left In America, Certainly By European Standards Even The Left Is Quite Right Wing Here.

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

What Can't Be Cured Must Be Endured.

A Book Is Not Completed Till It's Read.

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.

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.

Like Everybody Else, I've Had Relationships In Which I Was Passionately In Love But Was Completely Miserable All The Time And Didn't Trust The Person I Was In Love With One Inch.

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

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.

Falling In Love

Doris Lessing Really Doesn't Care What The Critics Say. In Fact, She Orders Her Publishers Not To Send Her The Reviews And Gets Cross With Them If They Do Because She Doesn't Want That In Her Head. She's Going Where She's Going, And That's Where She Wants To Go.

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

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

Thought I Was Doing Two Things. One Is Inquiring Into The Phenomenon Of Revelation, If You Are Not A Religious Person. But, Clearly, It's A Sincere Phenomenon.

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.

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

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 Didn't Become A Writer To Write About Me.

There's A Lot Of Conflict And Darkness Inside Everybody's Family. We All Pretend To Outsiders That It's Not So But Behind Locked Doors There Are Usually High Emotions Running.

Who What Am I? My Answer: I Am The Sum Total Of Everything That Went Before Me, Of All I Have Been Seen Done, Of Everything Done-to-me. I Am Everyone Everything Whose Being-in-the-world Affected Was Affected By Mine. I Am Anything That Happens After I’ve Gone Which Would Not Have Happened If I Had Not Come. Nor Am I Particularly Exceptional In This Matter; Each "i", Every One Of The Now-six-hundred-million-plus Of Us, Contains A Similar Multitude. I Repeat For The Last Time: To Understand Me, You’ll Have To Swallow The World.

When You Write, You Write Out Of Your Best Self. Everything Else Drops Away.

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

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

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.

‎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.

With Death Comes Honesty.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In The Cookie Of Life, Friends Are The Chocolate Chips.

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.'

Realism Can Break A Writer's Heart.

Human Beings, You See, Do Absolutely Two Primary Things. We See Like And Unlike. Like Becomes, In Literature, Simile And Metaphor. Unlike Becomes Uniqueness And Difference, From Which I Believe, The Novel Is Born.

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.

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.

In The End, The Thing That's Important About Free Expression Is That It's The Right From Which All Other Rights Are Derived. If You Can't Articulate Ideas And If You Can't Articulate Critiques Of Other Peoples' Ideas, Then You're Powerless. What Always Increases The Power Of An Authoritarian Regime Is Whether It Can Successfully Prevent People From Expressing Themselves.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Is Birth Always A Fall?

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

Religion, A Mediaeval Form Of Unreason, When Combined With Modern Weaponry Becomes A Real Threat To Our Freedoms. This Religious Totalitarianism Has Caused A Deadly Mutation In The Heart Of Islam And We See The Tragic Consequences In Paris Today.

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.

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.

Khattam-shud,' He Said Slowly, 'is The Arch-enemy Of All Stories, Even Of Language Itself. He Is The Prince Of Silence And The Foe Of Speech. And Because Everything Ends, Because Dreams End, Stories End, Life Ends, At The Finish Of Everything We Use His Name. "it's Finished," We Tell One Another, "it's Over. Khattam-shud: The End.

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.

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.

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.

The Glamour Of Being Forbidden Must Not Be Underestimated.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

Ideas Are Interesting To Me, And Religions Are A Place Where Ideas Have Been Very Subtly Embodied For Thousands Of Years. All Literature Started As Sacred Literature.

An Iceberg Is Water Striving To Be Land; A Mountain, Especially A Himalaya, Especially Everest, Is Land's Attempt To Metamorphose Into Sky; It Is Grounded In Flight, The Earth Mutated--nearly--into Air, And Become, In The True Sense, Exalted. Long Before She Ever Encountered The Mountain, Allie Was Aware Of Its Brooding Presence In Her Soul.

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.

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.

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.

One Of The Strange Things About Violent And Authoritarian Regimes Is They Don't Like The Glare Of Negative Publicity.

The Field Of The Novel Is Very Rich. If You're A Composer, You're Well Aware Of The History Of Composition, And You Are Trying To Make Your Music Part Of That History. You're Not Ahistorical. In The Same Way, I Think, If You Write Now, You Are Writing In The Historical Context Of What The Novel Has Been And What Possibilities It Has Revealed.

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.

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

Difficult Relationship

We All Dream Things Into Being; You Imagine Yourself Having A Child, And Then You Have A Child. An Inventor Will Think Of Something In His Mind And Then Make It Actual. So Things Are Often Passing From The Imagined Realm Into The Real World.

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

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

As Human Knowledge Has Grown, It Has Also Become Plain That Every Religious Story Ever Told About How We Got Here Is Quite Simply Wrong. This, Finally, Is What All Religions Have In Common. They Didn't Get It Right.

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

Hell Is Other People's Fantasies.

Chekhov Is This Poet Of Melancholy And Isolation And Of Wishing You Were Somewhere Else Than Where You Are.

If I Were Asked For A One-sentence Sound Bite On Religion, I Would Say I Was Against It.

O The Shame Of It, The Humiliating Shame Of Being Condescended To By Dolts

If Somebody's Trying To Shut You Up, Sing Louder, And If Possible, Better.

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

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.

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.

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.

We Live In A Frightened Time, And People Self-censor All The Time And Are Afraid Of Going Into Some Subjects Because They Are Worried About Violent Reactions.

There Is No Alternative To The Peaceful Coexistence Of Cultures.

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

The Rate Of Change Is Global Now. I Think There's A Kind Of Mind That Is So Ill At Ease With That Transformation That It Reaches Out For Something Permanent. And Religious Faith Offers That, From Simplicities, Which You Are Told Are Eternal And Unchanging, And You Can Hold On To Those Like A Life Raft In A Metamorphosing World.

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.

For Me, What I've Always Seen In Writers And Artists Is The Courage It Takes To Make An Original Work Of Art. I Think The Real Risks In Literature Are Linguistic And Intellectual, And I Hope We Can Highlight Those, As Well As Political Courage.

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

A Man Who Catches History's Eye Is Thereafter Bound To A Mistress From Whom He Will Never Escape.

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

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.

Sometimes By A Woodland Stream He Watched The Water Rush Over The Pebbled Bed, Its Tiny Modulations Of Bounce And Flow. A Woman's Body Was Like That. If You Watched It Carefully Enough You Could See How It Moved To The Rhythm Of The World, The Deep Rhythm, The Music Below The Music, The Truth Below The Truth. He Believed In This Hidden Truth The Way Other Men Believed In God Or Love, Believed That Truth Was In Fact Always Hidden, That The Apparent, The Overt, Was Invariably A Kind Of Lie.

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.

When I Am Writing Novels I Don't Read A Lot Of Novels So I Try To Catch Up In-between.

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

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.

I Grew Up Kissing Books And Bread.

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

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.

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.

I've Never Seen Anywhere In The World As Beautiful As Kashmir. It Has Something To Do With The Fact That The Valley Is Very Small And The Mountains Are Very Big, So You Have This Miniature Countryside Surrounded By The Himalayas, And It's Just Spectacular. And It's True, The People Are Very Beautiful Too.

Few Topographical Boundaries Can Rival The Frontiers Of The Mind.

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

There Is A Widespread Difficulty In The Muslim World, Which Has To Do With How The People Are Taught About Examining Their Own History. A Whole Range Of Stuff Has Been Placed Off Limits.

I Think, In A Written Novel, The Way In Which You Play With The Readers' Emotion Or The Way In Which You Engage The Readers' Emotions Can Be Very Indirect. You Could Come At It Through Irony Or Comedy, Etcetera, And You Could Capture People's Sympathies And Feelings Kind Of By Stealth If You Like.

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."

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

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

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

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

In Any Authoritarian Society, The Possessor Of Power Dictates, And If You Try And Step Outside, He Will Come After You. This Is Equally True Of Sovietism, Of China And Of Iran, And In Our Time It Has Happened A Lot In Islam. The Point Is That It's Worse When The Authoritarianism Is Supported By Something Supernatural.

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.

What Is Freedom Of Expression? Without The Freedom To Offend, It Ceases To Exist.

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.

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

The Pen/barbara Goldsmith Freedom To Write Award Is A Way Of Spotlighting Individual Cases. If You Look At The History Of The Award, The Freedom Rate Is Very High: A Very High Percentage Of People Who Receive Those Awards Are Freed In The Next Six Months To A Year. The Only Weapon There Is Attention, But Interestingly It Works.

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

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.

Reality Is A Question Of Perspective; The Further You Get From The Past, The More Concrete And Plausible It Seems - But As You Approach The Present, It Inevitably Seems More And More Incredible.

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

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.

I Always Thought Storytelling Was Like Juggling [...] You Keep A Lot Of Different Tales In The Air, And Juggle Them Up And Down, And If You're Good You Don't Drop Any.

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.

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

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