“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.”
— Salman Rushdie
“It’s obvious that I come down on the side of free speech for anybody’s work.”
“I remember when I was young, many cities in the Muslim world were cosmopolitan cities with a lot of culture.”
“We walk unknowing amid the shadows of our past and, forgetting our history, are ignorant of ourselves.”
“PLEASE BELIEVE that I am falling apart.”
“They came into being simultaneously in a garden, Eve and Adam, fully grown and naked and enjoying you could say the first Big Bang, and they had no idea how they got there until a snake led them to the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and when they ate its fruit they both simultaneously came up with the idea of a creator-god, a good- and-evil decider, a gardener-god who made the garden, otherwise where did the garden come from, and then planted them in it like rootless plants. And.”
“For an instant, silence, noisier than a waterfall.”
“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.”
“It was the resilience in human beings that represented their best chance of survival, their ability to look the unimaginable, the unconscionable, the unprecedented in the eye.”
“Writers have been in terrible situations and have yet managed to produce extraordinary work.”
“In a novel, if you’re any good, you don’t just have good people or bad people. You have complicated people. You have real people.”
“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.”
“Raif Badawi’s is an important voice for all of us to hear.”
“Before I came to England, my favorite authors were P. G. Wodehouse and Agatha Christie. I used to devour both.”
“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.”
“Look at history. It’s not the account of a species at peace.”
“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.”
“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.”
“He had picked up languages the way most sailors pick up diseases; languages were his gonorrhoea, his syphilis, his scurvy, his ague, his plague.”
“I discovered that if you find the language to talk to younger readers, children can accept anything.”
“Our lives are not what we deserve; they are, let us agree, in many ways deficient.”
“It just requires so much of you, and most of the time you feel dumb.”
“I don’t know what to say about literary critics. I think it’s probably best to say nothing.”
“When you write, you write out of your best self. Everything else drops away.”
“Until you know who you are you can’t write.”
“I didn’t become a writer to write about me.”
“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 Turkey wants to join Europe, it will have to become a European country, and that might take a long time.”
“Writers have an opinion about the world and offer arguments about the world. They should offer contemplation.”
“People are always telling me that they’ve seen people reading my books on the subway, or the beach, or whenever.”
“The USA approach looks like bullying because it is.”
“The West sees Iran as an important force in the gulf.”
“I’ve never had very high regard for therapists. I owe my health, my mental survival, to my friends and loved ones.”
“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.”
“This is not what I had planned; but perhaps the story you finish is never the one you begin.”
“The publishing of a book is a worldwide event. The attempt to suppress a book is a worldwide event.”
“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.”
“Killing people because you don’t like their ideas – it’s a bad thing.”
“I’ve always prided myself on my discipline as a writer. I do it like a job. I get up in the morning and go to my desk.”
“Science fiction is where I started out, really. When I was a kid, I was a complete addict of science fiction. It was one of my earliest interests as a writer, and I’ve just taken a long time to circle back around to it.”
“I don’t feel American. I do feel like a New Yorker. I think there’s a real distinction there. A city allows you to become a citizen even when you’re not a national.”
“They drove past buses that dripped people the way a sponge drips water, and arrived at a thick forest of human beings, a crowd of people sprouting in all directions like leaves on jungle trees.”
“You can’t have modern states based on ideas which have been out of date for a thousand years.”
“In general, writers shouldn’t be killed for what they write, though I can think of exceptions.”
“We were all trapped in stories, she said, just as he used to say, his wavy hair, his naughty smile, his beautiful mind, each of us the prisoner of our own solipsistic narrative, each family the captive of the family story, each community locked within its own tale of itself, each people the victims of their own versions of history, and there were parts of the world where the narratives collided and went to war, where there were two or more incompatible stories fighting for space on, to speak, the same page.”
“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.”
“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.”
“I’m a world expert on superhero comics. I think maybe only Michael Chabon knows more than me.”
“Our human tragedy is that we are unable to comprehend our experience, it slips through our fingers, we can’t hold on to it, and the more time passes, the harder it gets... My father said that the natural world gave us explanations to compensate for the meanings we could not grasp. The slant of the cold sunlight on a winter pine, the music of water, an oar cutting the lake and the flight of birds, the mountains’ nobility, the silence of the silence. We are given life but must accept that it is unattainable and rejoice in what can be held in the eye, the memory, the mind.”
“You will see, as time goes by,” said Ibn Rushd, “that in the end it will be religion that will make men turn away from God. The godly are God’s worst advocates. It may take a thousand and one years but in the end religion will shrivel away and only then will we begin to live in God’s truth.”
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