“What would a respectful political cartoon look like?”
— Salman Rushdie
“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.”
“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.’”
“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.”
“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.”
“Terror is glamour – not only, but also. I am firmly convinced that there’s something like a fascination with death among suicide bombers.”
“The Christian Coalition is still about Christianity, even if it’s an idea of Christianity that many Christians might not go along with.”
“There is no alternative to the peaceful coexistence of cultures.”
“I’ve met the Dalai Lama briefly, but I would probably say my grandfather was the wisest person I ever met. He was my mother’s father, an Indian, a family doctor, and very unlike me in that he was deeply religious.”
“Too many people had spent too long demonizing or totemizing me to listen seriously to what I had to say.”
“Anyone who reads my work will see that there are often difficult relationships between fathers and sons.”
“For a fellow who’s not to much to look at, you have the instincts of a champion.”
“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.”
“England in a way is lucky. It’s an island, so the frontiers are given by the sea.”
“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.”
“Once you get that instinct for the fictiveness, the fictionality of fiction, it kind of sets you free.”
“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.”
“All art began as sacred art, you know? I mean, all painting began as religious painting. All writing began as religious writing.”
“Fundamentalism isn’t about religion, it’s about power.”
“I have always thought that these two ways of talking, one is the fantastic, the fable, the fairy tale, and the other being history, the scholarly study of what happened, I think they’re both amazing ways to understand human nature.”
“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.”
“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.”
“In Iran, fundamentalism was fuelled to an extent by the regime of the Shah being supported by the West.”
“Have you noticed the physical resemblance between Imran Khan and Gaddafi? If you were making a movie of the life of Gaddafi and you wanted a slightly better-looking version of Gaddafi, you might cast Imran Khan.”
“I’m not a big fan of there being voiceovers in movies. I really prefer it when the film tells it story.”
“When we stop believing in the gods we can start believing in their stories.”
“I don’t think there is a need for an entity like God in my life.”
“Why obliterate the exceptional merely in order to make the outstanding look finer than it was?”
“I would argue that religion comes from a desire to get to the questions of, ‘Where do we come from?’ and ‘How shall we live?’ And I would say I don’t need religion to answer those questions.”
“Be sure that you go to the author to get at his meaning, not to find yours.”
“Someone asked me if I was afraid to write my memoirs. I told him: ‘We have to stop drawing up accounts of fear! We live in a society in which people are allowed to tell their story, and that is what I do.’”
“People must be protected from prejudice against their person. But people cannot be protected from prejudice against their ideas – because otherwise we’re all done.”
“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.”
“I’ll tell you what divorce hasn’t taught me. It didn’t teach me not to get married again.”
“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.”
“When you start writing about the stuff that is the central experience of your own life, you can talk about whatever you want, in whatever way you want.”
“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 did a lot of student acting when I was young.”
“It may be that the books that were best liked in your lifetime are not the ones that are best liked 100 years later.”
“In the movies, the writer is just the servant, the employee.”
“Few topographical boundaries can rival the frontiers of the mind.”
“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.”
“Freedom to reject is the only freedom.”
“Sometimes I think that when people become famous, there’s a public perception that they are not human beings any more. They don’t have feelings; they don’t get hurt; you can act and say as you like about them.”
“The people suffering most from the Taliban were Afghans.”
“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.”
“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 for one don’t need a supreme “sacred” arbiter in order to be a moral being.”
“Original thought, original artistic expression is by its very nature questioning, irreverent, iconoclastic.”
“I think anyone who knows me at all knows that I have been a movie addict all my life. I grew up in a city obsessed by cinema and where there are cinemas on every street corner.”
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