“From birds she learned how to sing; from cats she learned a form of dangerous independence.”
— Salman Rushdie
“The lessons one learns at school are not always the ones the school thinks it’s teaching.”
“Death and life were just adjacent verandas.”
“Fundamentalists of all faiths are the fundamental evil of our time.”
“Hell is other people’s fantasies...”
“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.”
“I think the veil is a way of taking power away from women.”
“If I were asked for a one-sentence sound bite on religion, I would say I was against it.”
“Sometimes when you finish a book, you don’t know quite what you’ve got.”
“The Chinese are good at repression and can be pretty ruthless about it.”
“I do not need the idea of God to explain the world I live in.”
“Is birth always a fall?”
“We were language’s magpies by nature, stealing whatever sounded bright and shiny.”
“A man is sane only to the extent that he subscribes to a previously-agreed construction of reality.”
“I think that England made a very big, historical mistake to allow itself to become the kind of terrorist capital of the world.”
“I have no problem with people’s religious beliefs. I just don’t happen to have any.”
“You don’t fight radical conservatism with not-quite-so radical conservatism.”
“What kind of God is it who’s upset by a cartoon in Danish?”
“India is my kid sister.”
“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.”
“The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas – uncertainty, progress, change – into crimes.”
“The mistake of the West was to put the Sauds on the throne of Saudi Arabia and give them control of the world’s oil fortune, which they then used to propagate Wahhabi Islam.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Human beings understand themselves and shape their futures by arguing and challenging and questioning and saying the un-sayable, not by bowing the knee whether to gods or to men.”
“Very often, people who actually pick up a book of mine for the first time are kind of surprised. And I get these letters saying, well, who knew that you were good, you know?”
“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.”
“Acting was always my unscratched itch, when I was in college and even afterwards.”
“If you actually want to change your world, there is a better way of doing it than blowing yourself up.”
“Wherever goodness lay, it did not lie in ritual, unthinking obeisance before a deity but rather, perhaps, in the slow clumsy, error-strewn working out of an individual or collective path.”
“We are the only animals that tell stories to understand the world we live in.”
“Children like being a little scared, but they don’t want to be disturbed.”
“Doubt, it seems to me, is the central condition of a human being in the twentieth century.”
“I only met Margaret Thatcher twice. The thing that I thought about meeting her was how extraordinarily intelligent she was. You really had to be on your game; otherwise, she’d make mincemeat of you.”
“I’ve never rejected the world I came from. To be rejected by it is horrible.”
“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.”
“You start at the stupid end of the book, and if you’re lucky you finish at the smart end.”
“Such is the miraculous nature of the future of exiles: what is first uttered in the impotence of an overheated apartment becomes the fate of nations.”
“History could claw upward as well as down. The powerful could be deafened by the cries of the poor.”
“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.”
“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.”
“What one writer can make in the solitude of one room is something no power can easily destroy.”
“It’s Kennedy’s war, Vietnam. Lyndon Johnson got all the flak, but it’s Kennedy’s war.”
“The problem of telling contemporary history is that your message gets outdated.”
“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.”
“If you have children, you worry about the world you’re leaving them.”
“If the creative artist worries if he will still be free tomorrow, then he will not be free today.”
“In the real world, immeasurable hurt is caused by terrorists based in Pakistan who attack countries like India.”
“The world, somebody wrote, is the place we prove real by dying in it.”
“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.”
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