Background Image

...

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.

-Salman Rushdie

...

Please Wait....
Translating....

When A Reader Falls

Salman Rushdie

...

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.

Views: 10

Topic

Falling In Love

More From Salman Rushdie

One Of The Things A Writer Is For Is To Say The Unsayable, Speak The Unspeakable And Ask Difficult Questions.

Difficult Questions

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

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.

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

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.

In India, As Elsewhere In Our Darkening World, Religion Is The Poison In The Blood. Where Religion Intervenes, Mere Innocence Is No Excuse. Yet We Go On Skating Around This Issue, Speaking Of Religion In The Fashionable Language Of 'respect.' What Is There To Respect In Any Of This, Or In Any Of The Crimes Now Being Committed Almost Daily Around The World In Religion's Dreaded Name?

World Religions

The Publishing Of A Book Is A Worldwide Event. The Attempt To Suppress A Book Is A Worldwide Event.

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

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

Meaning Is A Shaky Edifice We Build Out Of Scraps, Dogmas, Childhood Injuries, Newspaper Articles, Chance Remarks, Old Fillms, Small Victories, People Hated, People Loved; Perhaps It Is Because Our Sense Of What Is The Case Is Constructed From Such Inadequate Materials That We Defend It So Fiercely, Even To Death.

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?

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

What Is Freedom Of Expression? Without The Freedom To Offend, It Ceases To Exist. Without The Freedom To Challenge, Even To Satirize All Orthodoxies, It Ceases To Exist. Language And The Imagination Cannot Be Imprisoned, Or Art Will Die, And With It, A Little Of What Makes Us Human.

No, I Don't Think It's Fair To Label Islam 'violent.' But I Will Say That To My Knowledge, No Writer Has Ever Gone Into Hiding For Criticizing The Amish.

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

The Problem's Name Is God.

All Names Mean Something.

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.

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

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.

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.

Certainly, Poverty And Economic Decline Have A Lot To Do With The So-called Rage Of Islam. You've Got All These Young Men In Countries Which Are Economically In Bad Shape. The Idea That They Might Be Able To Make A Good Living And Get Married And Have A Family, A Decent Life, Seems Very Remote To A Lot Of People In A Lot Of The World.

I Did A Lot Of Student Acting When I Was Young.

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

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.

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?

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

The Interesting Thing About History Sometimes. Is That You Know These People Existed, And You Knew What Jobs They Did, But You Don't Know Much About Them As People, So You Actually Have To Make Them Up.

India Is My Kid Sister.

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.

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

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

I Hate Admitting That My Enemies Have A Point.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I Don't Think People Cry Reading 'midnight's Children,' But A Lot Of People Seem To Cry Watching The Movie.

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

One Of The Problems With Defending Free Speech Is You Often Have To Defend People That You Find To Be Outrageous And Unpleasant And Disgusting.

Literature Is The One Place In Any Society Where, Within The Secrecy Of Our Own Heads, We Can Hear Voices Talking About Everythingin Every Possible Way. The Reason For Ensuring That That Privileged Arena Is Preserved Is Not That Writers Want The Absolute Freedom To Say And Do Whatever They Please. It Is That We, All Of Us, Readers And Writers And Citizens And Generals And Goodmen, Need That Little, Unimportant-looking Room. We Do Not Need To Call It Sacred, But We Do Need To Remember That It Is Necessary.

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.

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

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.

You Don't Fight Radical Conservatism With Not-quite-so Radical Conservatism.

Books Choose Their Authors; The Act Of Creation Is Not Entirely A Rational And Conscious One.

I Always Thought The Front Line Was The Bookstores. And Bookstores Around America, Around The World Did Astonishingly Well. They Held The Line. They Didn't Chicken Out. You Know, They Defended The Book. They Kept It In The Front Of The Store.

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.

I Do Think Of Bombay As My Hometown. Those Are The Streets I Walked When I Was Learning To Walk. And It's The Place That My Imagination Has Returned To More Than Anywhere Else.

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.

It Is Literature Which For Me Opened The Mysterious And Decisive Doors Of Imagination And Understanding. To See The Way Others See. To Think The Way Others Think. And Above All, To Feel.

My Love For Dan Brown Knows No Bounds. It Literally Has No Mass.

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.

A Book Is Not Completed Till It's Read.

I'm Not A Prophet, But I Always Thought It Was Natural For Dictatorships To Fall. I Remember In 1989, Two Months Before The Fall Of The Berlin Wall, Had You Said It Was Going To Happen No One Would Have Believed You. The System Seemed Powerful And Unbreakable. Suddenly Overnight It Blew Away Like Dust.

There Is No Magic On Earth Strong Enough To Wipe Out The Legacies Of One's Parents.

I'm A World Expert On Superhero Comics. I Think Maybe Only Michael Chabon Knows More Than Me.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

...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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Reality Is A Question Of Perspective.

He Had Picked Up Languages The Way Most Sailors Pick Up Diseases; Languages Were His Gonorrhoea, His Syphilis, His Scurvy, His Ague, His Plague.

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.

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.

That's The Trouble With You Sad-city Types: A Place Has To Be Miserable And Dull As Ditchwater Before You Believe It's Real.

People Are Always Telling Me That They've Seen People Reading My Books On The Subway, Or The Beach, Or Whenever.

There's No Point Going To A Country Which Is Torturing People To Ask Them To Stop If They Can Point Out That The United States Is Doing It Too. It Enormously Weakens The Argument. Back In The Early Days Of The Bush Administration, Pen Made A Decision That We Would Try And Make Human Rights Issues And Civil Rights Issues In This Country Part Of The Priority, And Not Just International Issues, Which Had More Or Less Been The Priority Up Until Then.

The Answer To Religion Is Not No Religion, But Another Way Of Thinking Of It. Another Way Of Being In It.

If You Want To Draw People Into The Story, You Really Have To Write As If You're Writing A Novel And Make These Actually-existing People, Including The Actually-existing Person With My Name, Into A Believable Person On The Page. And That Requires Distance. That Requires Not Being Right Up Against The Events You're Talking About.

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 Glamour Of Being Forbidden Must Not Be Underestimated.

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.

I Had A Very Difficult Relationship With My Father, Which Ended Up Okay, But There Were Many Difficult Years.

Difficult Relationship

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.

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

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.

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

Prophet Mohammed Would Have No Objection To The Satanic Verses.

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.

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.

The Worst, Most Insidious Effect Of Censorship Is That, In The End, It Can Deaden The Imagination Of The People. Where There Is No Debate, It Is Hard To Go On Remembering, Every Day, That There Is A Suppressed Side To Every Argument.

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

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

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

So Thomas Pynchon Wants A Private Life And No Photographs And Nobody To Know His Home Address. I Can Dig It, I Can Relate To That (but, Like, He Should Try It When It's Compulsory Instead Of A Free-choice Option).

Youtube Is Full Of Pieces Of Trash. If You Want To Look On Youtube And Find Something That Insults You, You Can Probably Find It.

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.

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

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.

Perhaps, If One Wishes To Remain An Individual In The Midst Of The Teeming Multitudes, One Must Make Oneself Grotesque.

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.

We Crave Permission Openly To Become Our Secret Selves.

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

Cruelty Is Not A Literary Value.

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

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.

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.

To See Things Plainly, You Have To Cross A Frontier.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Most American Writers Don't Get Asked Their Opinion On Current Affairs, Whereas In Europe And England, We Still Do. There Are Writers Here Who Are The Most Sophisticated Commentators, But They're Not Asked. Like Don Delillo, Who Sort Of Forecast Most Of The Modern World Before It Happened.

Optimism Is A Disease

Our Lives Teach Us Who We Are.

Live On, Survive, For The Earth Gives Forth Wonders. It May Swallow Your Heart, But The Wonders Keep On Coming. You Stand Before Them Bareheaded, Shriven. What Is Expected Of You Is Attention.

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.

Obviously, A Rigid, Blinkered, Absolutist World View Is The Easiest To Keep Hold Of, Whereas The Fluid, Uncertain, Metamorphic Picture I've Always Carried About Is Rather More Vulnerable.

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.

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.

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.

I Saw Quentin Tarantino's 'django Unchained,' And You Could Say A Lot Of Things Against It, But It Was Incredible Fun. I Don't Like Blood And Gore And I Am Very Squeamish About Violence, But Tarantino's Violence Is Actually Funny.

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.

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

If By Some Bizarre Chance There Turns Out To Be A God [...], I'm Willing To Bet He's An Atheist Too.

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

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.

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.

What You Were Is Forever Who You Are.

I Beat My Sons In Real-life Table Tennis, But Virtually, I Get Murdered. I Download Games On The Iphone That I'm Addicted To - I'm A Master At "angry Birds."

What Can't Be Cured Must Be Endured.

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.

Discovery Is Fun. I Am Incredibly Open To Everything.

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

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.

A People That Has Remained Convinced Of Its Greatness And Invulnerability, That Has Chosen To Believe Such A Myth In The Face Of All The Evidence, Is A People In The Grip Of A Kind Of Sleep, Or Madness.

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

In Europe, The Enlightenment Of The 18th Century Was Seen As A Battle Against The Desire Of The Church To Limit Intellectual Freedom, A Battle Against The Inquisition, A Battle Against Religious Censorship. And The Victory Of The Enlightenment In Europe Was Seen As Pushing Religion Away From The Center Of Power. In America, At The Same Time, The Enlightenment Meant Coming To A Country Where People Were Not Going To Persecute You By Reason Of Your Religion. So It Meant A Liberation Into Religion. In Europe, It Was Liberation Out Of Religion.

Many Of Us Didn't Believe In The Image Of Bin Laden As A Wandering Old Man Of The Mountains, Living On Plants And Insects In An Inhospitable Cave Somewhere On The Porous Pakistan-afghan Border.

The Problem Of Telling Contemporary History Is That Your Message Gets Outdated.

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.

The Only Thing Worse Than A Bad Review From The Ayatollah Khomeini Would Be A Good Review From The Ayatollah Khomeini.

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

One Of The Characteristics Of Mudslinging Is That Mud Sticks If It's Thrown With Enough Force For Long Enough.

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.

This Strange Business Of What It Is To Be A Writer Is This Increasingly Insane World In Which We Live, In Which Surrealism, It Seems, Is The New Realism.

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.

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.

I Have Been Only The Humblest Jugglers-with-facts; And That, In A Country Where The Truth Is What It Is Instructed To Be, Reality Quite Literally Ceases To Exist, So That Everything Becomes Possible Except What We Are Told Is The Case; And Maybe This Was The Difference Between My Indian Childhood And Pakistani Adolescence--that In The First I Was Beset By An Infinity Of Alternative Realities, While In The Second I Was Adrift, Disoriented, Amid An Equally Infinite Number Of Falsenesses, Unrealities And Lies.

Freedom Is Not A Tea Party, India. Freedom Is A War.

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

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

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?

In The '50s, Listening To Elvis And Others On The Radio In Bombay - It Didn't Feel Alien. Noises Made By A Truck Driver From Tupelo, Mississippi, Seemed Relevant To A Middle-class Kid Growing Up On The Other Side Of The World. That Has Always Fascinated Me.

[my Work] Is A Love Song To Our Mongrel Selves.

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

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

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

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.

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.

There Is No Alternative To The Peaceful Coexistence Of Cultures.

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

Liberate Yourself, Because No One Else Is Going To Liberate You

Gym Motivational

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

One Of The Problems Of Truth Being Censored For A Really Long Time Is That People Lose The Ability To Intuit What Truth Might Be, And Therefore Begin To Swallow Whatever They're Fed. I Think That's Something That The Chinese Have Learned Very Well. They've Even Managed To Persuade Quite Large Segments Of The Population That The Martyrs Of Tiananmen Were Actually An Anti-national Element. People Don't View Them As Heroes, They See Them As Troublemakers. There You Have A Combination Of Censorship Of Truth Creating A New Truth, Which Is The Lie, But It's Not Seen As Such.

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.

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

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

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

Very Often In Free Speech Cases You Find Yourself Defending Material That You Personally Detest, Because Of Course It's No Trick To Defend The Free Speech Of People You Either Agree With Or Who Don't Particularly Upset You. It's When People Really Upset You That You Discover If You Believe In Free Speech Or Not.

I'm A Novelist. Fortunately I Don't Have To Rule The World.

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.

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?

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

Good Advice Is Rarer Than Rubies.

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.

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.

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.

For A Fellow Who's Not To Much To Look At, You Have The Instincts Of A Champion.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.'

Every Time You Finish A Book, You Have A Terrible Feeling That There's Just Never Going To Be Another One. But Fortunately, So Far, The Next One Has Always Shown Up.

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.

I Am Clearly Vulnerable To These More Passionate And Volatile Unstable Relationships. I Am Trying To Not Be So Vulnerable.

I Discovered That If You Find The Language To Talk To Younger Readers, Children Can Accept Anything.

If There Were Israeli Attacks On Iranian Nuclear Facilities, It Makes It Certain There Would Be A Reprisal Attack Against The United States At Some Point.

In The Waking Dreams Our Societies Permit, In Our Myths, Our Arts, Our Songs, We Celebrate The Nonbelongers, The Different Ones, The Outlaws, The Freaks.

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

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.

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

Trending Author

Alan Dean Foster

Crystal Eastman

Category