The acceptance that all that is solid has melted into the air, that reality and morality are not givens but imperfect human constructs, is the point from which fiction begins.
Salman Rushdie
Related Being present is being connected to All Things. S. KELLEY HARRELL, M. DIV. The two men had a conversation. Brief, cryptic, to the point. As though they had exchanged numbers a... ARUNDHATI ROY I like to open for a band as it brings on sort of a challenge and it makes things more interesting. ... KELLY JONES You can't be that or that or that... but you can try to behave as that... So, what next!?... DEYTH BANGER Food Allergies Are Not Due to Food, Rather Are Due to the Constant Contamination of That Food That Y... THEHEALTHFOODGURU Integrity is not everything, but it is the only thing that matters. JEFFREY FRY Even after the dehadhyas (the belief that 'I am the body') has gone, people will say, "I saw you eat... DADA BHAGWAN When living is too sweet and swanky, it may be very hard to appreciate the simplest things in life. ... ERIK PEVERNAGIE Salman Rushdie, indeed any writer who abuses the prophet or indeed any prophet under Islamic law, th... YUSUF ISLAM All I ever did to that apartment was hang fifty yards of yellow theatrical silk across the bedroom w... JOAN DIDION We can never make proper goodbyes. It was your last ride in a Checker cab and you had no warning. It... COLSON WHITEHEAD Life is weird and wonderful like that, is it not. SONYA.E.WILLIAMS What Fucks me... is that we both are the same... we all walk on the same path... but everything is a... DEYTH BANGER His life seemed like a deck of cards, and in the midst of all those two’s and three’s someone ha... TEKOA MANNING You see, that's the whole point of being in government. If you don't like something you simply make ... RICHARD CURTIS Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plaus... SALMAN RUSHDIE If I still remember that all realities are neurological constructs and relative to the observer, I a... ROBERT ANTON WILSON The Biggest Threat to our Democracy, Freedoms and Future is Leadership that fosters and Appeases the... MICHAEL HARRIS Nonsense is that which does not fit into the prearranged patterns which we have superimposed on real... GARY ZUKAV If the best is possible, than good is never enough and only do the best. ROBERT SIAHAAN There will never be a good time, financially, to get married, unless you're Shaq or Ray Romano. But ... GREG BEHRENDT Cause if you shoot a bullet someone dies. If you drop a bomb many die. You hit a woman, love dies. B... RICHARD CURTIS I had forgotten that God, or the world, or whatever carves the rules in stone, doesn't give you time... TANA FRENCH The truth is, it's really only okay to be yourself if that self is within an accepted range of 'norm... STACEY KADE If you pour everything you have into this life, this world, which is temporary and fading, you're je... CRAIG GROESCHEL It might not be about perfection. Rather, it may be that that which is imperfect is that which has t... CRAIG D. LOUNSBROUGH Here is one fact 1 minute to finish the class, 1 day to die, one day behind that fact, one day in th... DEYTH BANGER To search the sands of a lost desert for truth and justice in this world today you might as well be ... GARY F EVANS... There's no real objection to escapism, in the right places... We all want to escape occasionally. Bu... ARTHUR C. CLARKE I believe that there is a Matrix and... to be more accurate I am in the Pornography Matrix. DEYTH BANGER Reality is how we interpret it. Imagination and volition play a part in that interpretation. Which m... YANN MARTEL Journalism constructs momentarily arrested equilibriums and gives disorder an implied order. That is... THOMAS GRIFFITH Today is about the now, the moment you live in, so do now what you want to do SOTONYE ANGA No one likes it, apart from blind people, and I'm sure even they can sense it's profound ugliness as... RICHARD CURTIS It's only awkward if it matters. JOYCE RACHELLE 19. Those who are the happiest are not necessarily those for whom life has been easiest. Emotional s... JAMES C. DOBSON The battle is not physical, it is spiritual and your mind is the battleground. Keep your mind pure a... JEANETTE CORON I'm always highly irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It i... FLANNERY O'CONNOR If a man WANTS to be with you, he will make his actions clear. There won’t be any questions, murki... MANDY HALE Reality shows are all the rage on TV at the moment, but that's not reality, it's just anothe... STEVEN SODERBERGH Death is the final sleep that you never awaken from. STEVEN MAGEE Millions of people acknowledge today that they do not know the meaning of life. JAMES C. DOBSON A friend of mine told a story about a date with a guy she was really excited about: He stood her up.... GREG BEHRENDT Be a good guide, tell me what you see, are sure is that? Please try to describe the picture as ... DEYTH BANGER In a deep metaphysical sense, all that is conditioned is illusory. All phenomena are literally '... ANNIE BESANT PEACE IS THE OBJECTIVE TO WAR, BUT THE BLOOD RUNNETH STILL NATALIE URQUIETA Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay.... FLANNERY O'CONNOR DIGESTION, n. The conversion of victuals into virtues. When the process is imperfect, vices are evol... AMBROSE BIERCE Fiction is an elemental force, which has the power to shape reality in its own image - or images, I ... RUTH OZEKI Morality, for all the conditioning to which the human mind has been and is subjected, is always a pe... JOHN CHRISTOPHER Dedication is the preparation to success! WERNER BOTHA Fiction is not imagination. It is what anticipates imagination by giving it the form of reality. Thi... JEAN BAUDRILLARD Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by. RALPH ELLISON Dehadhyas (the belief that ‘I am the body’) is to continue believing you are someone that you re... DADA BHAGWAN Fiction is [a form of writing which] reveals truths that reality obscures. JESSAMYN WEST I have for a long time loved fabulist, imaginative fiction, such as the writing of Italo Calvino, Jo... ALAN LIGHTMAN I'm sure that I know that, it's behind one of all doors. DEYTH BANGER Drop in a book by Salman Rushdie or another critic alongside it -- give the students an opportunity ... JOE GLOVER I believe that reality TV should be called 'not reality' TV; it's fiction. HILL HARPER There is six billion reasons for everything to go wrong and only one to get it right JULIO DAVILA The problem with a lot of Indian boys and girls is that they do not approach their partner, they are... APURVA GAGLANI The road to salvation is filled with many false dark turn-offs, if you take those roads they will le... GARY F EVANS... Things that break - be they bones, hearts, or promises - can be put back together but will never rea... JODI PICOULT Then that's what the Northern Lights are. All the lives that we're not living. ADI ALSAID Everyone is the Umbrella Man and he is everyone. Every cough, sneeze, smile and wave means both ever... CRAIG CLEVENGER So India’s problem turns out to be the world’s problem. What happened in India has happened in G... SALMAN RUSHDIE Music before all else, and for that choose the irregular, which is vaguer and melts better into the ... PAUL VERLAINE The more mysterious, the more imperfect: that which is mystically spoken is but half spoken. BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE Morality in its noblest forms remains inexplicable unless one takes into account that power of growt... ELLEN KEY Truth is always stranger than fiction. We craft fiction to match our sense of how things ought to be... DEAN KOONTZ Oh, I don’t mean to infer that you’re not a great guy. I’m sure you’re the exception to the ... JAYE FRANCES You should regard each meeting with a friend as a sitting he is unwillingly giving you for a portrai... HOPE MIRRLEES Our revels are now ended. These our actors
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted... WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Given that external reality is a fiction, the writer's role is almost superfluous. He does not nee... J. G. BALLARD Given that external reality is a fiction, the writer's role is almost superfluous. He does not need ... J. G. BALLARD Typing is the future of talking and to don't forgot and brother of feature. DEYTH BANGER The truth is, morality is not driven by anything, it is the one thing that drives everything else. M... ABHIJIT NASKAR But that the reasoning from these facts, the drawing from them correct conclusions, is a matter of g... NASSAU WILLIAM SENIOR You see death is a tool to degrade and destroy people, I see it as a life lesson that I use to empow... ANGEL RAMON MEDINA 28. Feelings are neither right nor wrong. It's what you do with them that causes the problems. JAMES C. DOBSON My poor body, madam, requires it: I am driven on by the flesh; and he must needs go that the devil d... WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Reality shows are all the rage on TV at the moment ... but that's not reality, it's just another aes... STEVEN SODERBERGH Life can be tough & make you wanna give up. But baby keep your head up because you got all the time ... LILLIAN S. VILORIA Metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when... MILAN KUNDERA In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point. FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE Many Scandinavian writers who had made their name in literary fiction felt they wanted to have a go ... JO NESBO Fiction, at the point of development at which it has arrived, demands from the writer a spirit of sc... JOSEPH CONRAD Embrace YOU...Believe in yourself, in this very moment...forgive yourself for all mistakes and 'bad'... ANGIE KARAN The brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records ever... MILAN KUNDERA Morality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that 99% of them are ... H. L. MENCKEN My understanding of the creative process is simply that all cultures and all concerns meet at a cert... WOLE SOYINKA I am aware that when we see something, we are getting only a measure of information, a sense, an ink... DON DELILLO Compassion is, by definition, relational. Compassion literally means “to suffer with,” which imp... KRISTIN NEFF We are the only country in the world that has taken people from so many different backgrounds, which... LAMAR ALEXANDER The fact is that one of the earliest lessons I learned in business was that balance sheets and incom... CHRIS CHOCOLA The problem is acceptance, which is something we're taught not to do. We're taught to improve uncomf... ANNE LAMOTT The acceptance of the reality that we are in the Lord's loving hands is only a recognition that we h... NEAL A. MAXWELL Empathy is the new measurement of everything. It doesn't matter what religion you have, what God you... C. JOYBELL C. This is my fundamental teaching: that there is no division between this and that. That is contained ... OSHO The things of substance are the things that we need to focus on, but they are the things that seem t... ELIZABETH ALRAUNE
More Salman Rushdie
We are the storytelling animal. SALMAN RUSHDIE It is very, very easy not to be offended by a book. You just have to shut it. SALMAN RUSHDIE What happened in Pakistan was that people were told: You're all Muslim, so now you're a coun... SALMAN RUSHDIE If you're offended, it's your problem. SALMAN RUSHDIE War used to be something you could stand on the nearby hill and watch. Now we have total war; everyb... SALMAN RUSHDIE There is nothing intrinsic linking any religion with any act of violence. The crusades don't pro... SALMAN RUSHDIE The First Amendment defends all forms of speech including hate speech, which is why groups like Ku K... SALMAN RUSHDIE One of the problems with defending free speech is you often have to defend people that you find to b... SALMAN RUSHDIE When you write, you write out of your best self. Everything else drops away. SALMAN RUSHDIE What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist. SALMAN RUSHDIE Censorship is the thing that stops you doing what you want to do, and what writers want to talk abou... SALMAN RUSHDIE In an ideal world, you could reunite the Pakistan-occupied part of Kashmir with the Indian-occupied ... SALMAN RUSHDIE A purpose of our lives is to broaden what we can understand and say and therefore be. SALMAN RUSHDIE So India’s problem turns out to be the world’s problem. What happened in India has happened in G... SALMAN RUSHDIE No people whose word for 'yesterday' is the same as their word for 'tomorrow' can be said to have... SALMAN RUSHDIE The novel does not seek to establish a privileged language but it insists upon the freedom to portra... SALMAN RUSHDIE Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can't forgive. SALMAN RUSHDIE Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; t... SALMAN RUSHDIE I make no complaint. I am a writer. I do not accept my condition; I will strive to change it; but I ... SALMAN RUSHDIE I have been a film buff all my life and believe that the finest cinema is fully the equal of the bes... SALMAN RUSHDIE The suicide bomber's imagination leads him to believe in a brilliant act of heroism, when in fac... SALMAN RUSHDIE Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plaus... SALMAN RUSHDIE In writing 'The Satanic Verses,' I think I was writing for the first time from the whole of ... SALMAN RUSHDIE You can take the boy out of Bombay; you can't take Bombay out of the boy, you know. SALMAN RUSHDIE I do think of Bombay as my hometown. Those are the streets I walked when I was learning to walk. And... SALMAN RUSHDIE I have always thought, the secret purpose of the book tour is to make the writer hate the book he... SALMAN RUSHDIE Names, once they are in common use, quickly become mere sounds, their etymology being buried, like s... SALMAN RUSHDIE One of the extraordinary things about human events is that the unthinkable becomes thinkable. SALMAN RUSHDIE When thought becomes excessively painful, action is the finest remedy. SALMAN RUSHDIE A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape t... SALMAN RUSHDIE The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because ... SALMAN RUSHDIE I used to say: there is a God-shaped hole in me. For a long time I stressed the absence, the hole. N... SALMAN RUSHDIE The real risks for any artist are taken in pushing the work to the limits of what is possible, in th... SALMAN RUSHDIE The writers of the French enlightenment had deliberately used blasphemy as a weapon, refusing to acc... SALMAN RUSHDIE This paranoid Islam, which blames outsider, 'infidels', for all the ills of Muslim societies... SALMAN RUSHDIE I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything do... SALMAN RUSHDIE If you want to tell the untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you've got to fi... SALMAN RUSHDIE The liveliness of literature lies in its exceptionality, in being the individual, idiosyncratic visi... SALMAN RUSHDIE The only privilege literature deserves -- and this privilege it requires in order to exist -- is the... SALMAN RUSHDIE Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human ... SALMAN RUSHDIE Literature is the one place in any society where, within the secrecy of our own heads, we can hear v... SALMAN RUSHDIE We must conclude that it is not only a particular political ideology that has failed, but the idea t... SALMAN RUSHDIE In this world without quiet corners, there can be no easy escapes from history, from hullabaloo, fro... SALMAN RUSHDIE Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself. SALMAN RUSHDIE For the barbarians were not only at our gates but within our skins. We were our own wooden horses, e... SALMAN RUSHDIE Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts. SALMAN RUSHDIE Such is the miraculous nature of the future of exiles: what is first uttered in the impotence of an ... SALMAN RUSHDIE Your blasphemy, Salman, can't be forgiven. To set your words against the Words of God. SALMAN RUSHDIE Where there is no belief, there is no blasphemy. SALMAN RUSHDIE Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plaus... SALMAN RUSHDIE Vertigo is the conflict between the fear of falling and the desire to fall. SALMAN RUSHDIE Realism can break a writer's heart. SALMAN RUSHDIE Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, the power to retell it, rethi... SALMAN RUSHDIE ...because it is the privilige and the curse of midnight's children to be both masters and victims o... SALMAN RUSHDIE Thomas Pynchon looks exactly like Thomas Pynchon should look. He is tall, he wears lumberjack shirts... SALMAN RUSHDIE I hate admitting that my enemies have a point. SALMAN RUSHDIE Most American writers don't get asked their opinion on current affairs, whereas in Europe and En... SALMAN RUSHDIE Stories in families are colossally important. Every family has stories: some funny, some proud, some... SALMAN RUSHDIE I think, in a written novel, the way in which you play with the readers' emotion or the way in w... SALMAN RUSHDIE An attack upon our ability to tell stories is not just censorship - it is a crime against our nature... SALMAN RUSHDIE Pakistan is alarmed by the rising Indian influence in Afghanistan, and fears that an Afghanistan cle... SALMAN RUSHDIE British society has never been cleansed of the filth of imperialism. SALMAN RUSHDIE Straight answers were beyond the powers of Rashid Khalifa, who would never take a short cut if there... SALMAN RUSHDIE Self-censorship is a lie to yourself; if you are going to be trying to seriously create art, to crea... SALMAN RUSHDIE What's real and what's true aren't necessarily the same. SALMAN RUSHDIE Most of what matters in our lives takes place in our absence. SALMAN RUSHDIE faith without doubt is addiction SALMAN RUSHDIE Our lives disconnect and reconnect, we move on, and later we may again touch one another, again boun... SALMAN RUSHDIE The only people who see the whole picture,' he murmured, 'are the ones who step out of the frame. SALMAN RUSHDIE We all owe death a life. SALMAN RUSHDIE Free societies...are societies in motion, and with motion comes tension, dissent, friction. Free peo... SALMAN RUSHDIE To understand just one life you have to swallow the world ... do you wonder, then, that I was a heav... SALMAN RUSHDIE Nobody has the right to not be offended. That right doesn't exist in any declaration I have ever rea... SALMAN RUSHDIE A photograph is a moral decision taken in one eighth of a second. SALMAN RUSHDIE A poet's work . . . to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape... SALMAN RUSHDIE What kind of idea are you? Are you the kind that compromises, does deals, accomodates itself to soci... SALMAN RUSHDIE When a reader falls in love with a book, it leaves its essence inside him, like radioactive fallout ... SALMAN RUSHDIE Go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets. Take a deep breath before you b... SALMAN RUSHDIE Now I know what a ghost is. Unfinished business, that's what. SALMAN RUSHDIE Memory's truth, because memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates... SALMAN RUSHDIE Whenever someone who knows you disappears, you lose one version of yourself. Yourself as you were se... SALMAN RUSHDIE Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true... SALMAN RUSHDIE My horizon's have shrunk and I have only endings to write. SALMAN RUSHDIE Make as much racket as you like people. Noise is life and an excess of noise is a sign that life is ... SALMAN RUSHDIE In television, the 60-minute series, 'The Wire' and 'Mad Men' and so on, the writer ... SALMAN RUSHDIE If the creative artist worries if he will still be free tomorrow, then he will not be free today. SALMAN RUSHDIE Hyperrealism can create an atmosphere of surrealism because nobody sees the world in such detail. SALMAN RUSHDIE The difference between memoir and autobiography, as far as I see it, is that a memoir is there prima... SALMAN RUSHDIE In any authoritarian society, the possessor of power dictates, and if you try and step outside, he w... SALMAN RUSHDIE One of the strange things about violent and authoritarian regimes is they don't like the glare o... SALMAN RUSHDIE The response of anybody interested in liberty is that we all have a say and the ability to have an a... SALMAN RUSHDIE Many writers who have had to deal with the subject of atrocity can't face it head-on. SALMAN RUSHDIE Throughout human history, the apostles of purity, those who have claimed to possess a total explanat... SALMAN RUSHDIE If you live in free countries, you don't have to spend all your life arguing about freedom becau... SALMAN RUSHDIE What I worry about and don't like is the way in which the ideology of multiculturalism has decli... SALMAN RUSHDIE Sometimes great, banned works defy the censor's description and impose themselves on the world -... SALMAN RUSHDIE The Koran was revealed at a time of great change in the Arab world, the seventh-century shift from a... SALMAN RUSHDIE One of the reasons my name is Rushdie is that my father was an admirer of Ibn Rush'd, the 12th c... SALMAN RUSHDIE At the height of the British Empire very few English novels were written that dealt with British pow... SALMAN RUSHDIE Original thought, original artistic expression is by its very nature questioning, irreverent, iconoc... SALMAN RUSHDIE There are two things in Indian history - one is the incredible optimism and potential of the place, ... SALMAN RUSHDIE The only thing worse than a bad review from the Ayatollah Khomeini would be a good review from the A... SALMAN RUSHDIE I've been fascinated by Machiavelli since I was very young. I've always felt that he had a b... SALMAN RUSHDIE I'm not a prophet, but I always thought it was natural for dictatorships to fall. I remember in ... SALMAN RUSHDIE But there's one thing we must all be clear about: terrorism is not the pursuit of legitimate goa... SALMAN RUSHDIE I'm a big-city boy. What I like is big cities. It's not just what I like. It's what I wr... SALMAN RUSHDIE Two things form the bedrock of any open society - freedom of expression and rule of law. If you don&... SALMAN RUSHDIE Mahound comes to me for revelation, asking me to choose between monotheist and henotheist alternativ... SALMAN RUSHDIE Don't let the zealots make Muslim a terrifying word." [1,000 Days 'Trapped Inside a Me... SALMAN RUSHDIE Fundamentalism isn't about religion, it's about power. SALMAN RUSHDIE From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable. SALMAN RUSHDIE When...did it become irrational to dislike religion, any religion, even to dislike it vehemently? Wh... SALMAN RUSHDIE Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one. SALMAN RUSHDIE All my adult life, if I didn't have several hours a day to sit in a room by myself, I would get ... SALMAN RUSHDIE Out-of-step intellectuals like Noam Chomsky and the deceased Edward Said have often been dismissed a... SALMAN RUSHDIE American literature has always been immigrant. SALMAN RUSHDIE I've met the Dalai Lama briefly, but I would probably say my grandfather was the wisest person I... SALMAN RUSHDIE Our lives are not what we deserve; they are, let us agree, in many ways deficient. SALMAN RUSHDIE I have had many more close women friends than men, and I've always assumed that comes from the f... SALMAN RUSHDIE Before I came to England, my favorite authors were P. G. Wodehouse and Agatha Christie. I used to de... SALMAN RUSHDIE This is going to make me sound ancient, but I remember Juhu Beach when there weren't any buildin... SALMAN RUSHDIE If Woody Allen were a Muslim, he'd be dead by now. SALMAN RUSHDIE A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in ret... SALMAN RUSHDIE Our lives teach us who we are. SALMAN RUSHDIE Not even the visionary or mystical experience ever lasts very long. It is for art to capture that ex... SALMAN RUSHDIE How do you defeat terrorism? Don’t be terrorized. SALMAN RUSHDIE A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape... SALMAN RUSHDIE What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second,... SALMAN RUSHDIE If you look at Indian movies, every time they wanted an exotic locale, they would have a dance numbe... SALMAN RUSHDIE I think that we live in a very timid age, and a part of our timidity arises from our unwillingness t... SALMAN RUSHDIE I write books I'd enjoy reading, I'm the reader standing behind my shoulder. SALMAN RUSHDIE It seems that the right of freedom of speech that was enshrined in numerous constitutions is now und... SALMAN RUSHDIE Islam is unusual in that it's the only one of the great world religions which was born inside re... SALMAN RUSHDIE It's Kennedy's war, Vietnam. Lyndon Johnson got all the flak, but it's Kennedy's war... SALMAN RUSHDIE And now, as if to finish things off, the Himalayan winter is setting in, and the greatest calamity o... SALMAN RUSHDIE As a writer, one of the things we all learned from the movies was a kind of compression that didn... SALMAN RUSHDIE What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist SALMAN RUSHDIE Have you noticed the physical resemblance between Imran Khan and Gaddafi? If you were making a movie... SALMAN RUSHDIE Certainly, poverty and economic decline have a lot to do with the so-called rage of Islam. You'v... SALMAN RUSHDIE A poet's work is to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shap... SALMAN RUSHDIE A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, sha... SALMAN RUSHDIE Free societies are societies in motion, and with motion comes friction. SALMAN RUSHDIE If you're on a freeway and want to know if you're being followed, what you do is enormously ... SALMAN RUSHDIE In the real world, immeasurable hurt is caused by terrorists based in Pakistan who attack countries ... SALMAN RUSHDIE When thought becomes excessively painful, action is the finest remedy SALMAN RUSHDIE The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because ... SALMAN RUSHDIE What I've always tried to find in my books are points at which the private lives of the characte... SALMAN RUSHDIE wants the dreadful, wants to stare down the human race's worst-case scenarios. SALMAN RUSHDIE Rohinton Mistry's celebrated novel 'Such a Long Journey' was pulled off the syllabus of ... SALMAN RUSHDIE Meanwhile, it seems, the world is suffering from compassion fatigue, SALMAN RUSHDIE I've never seen anywhere in the world as beautiful as Kashmir. It has something to do with the f... SALMAN RUSHDIE The enemy for the fanatic is pleasure, which makes it extremely important to continue to indulge in ... SALMAN RUSHDIE Matthew Wiener on 'Mad Men' writes the entire series before they start shooting, and if you ... SALMAN RUSHDIE Someone asked me if I was afraid to write my memoirs. I told him: 'We have to stop drawing up ac... SALMAN RUSHDIE I only met Margaret Thatcher twice. The thing that I thought about meeting her was how extraordinari... SALMAN RUSHDIE A change in direction was required. The story you finished was perhaps never the one you began. Yes!... SALMAN RUSHDIE In today's U.S., it's possible for almost anyone - women, gays, African-Americans, Jews - to... SALMAN RUSHDIE When 'Midnight's Children' came out, people in the West tended to respond to the fantasy... SALMAN RUSHDIE The accidents of my life have given me the ability to make stories in which different parts of the w... SALMAN RUSHDIE Sometimes writing a novel is not unlike having a baby. You'd have to ask a female novelist to co... SALMAN RUSHDIE I have a deep feeling for Kashmir, and I just had to write this book, ... [But] it's very hard to wr... SALMAN RUSHDIE One of the strange things that happens when you publish a book is that you begin ... to see what res... SALMAN RUSHDIE The real risks for any artist are taken in pushing the work to the limits of what is possible, in th... SALMAN RUSHDIE Most of what matters in your life takes place in your absence. SALMAN RUSHDIE Friendships are the family we make - not the one we inherit. I've always been someone to whom fr... SALMAN RUSHDIE I didn't want to become some embittered old hack getting his revenge for the rest of my life. An... SALMAN RUSHDIE antediluvian, who think of homosexuality as ungodly, who have little time for real freedom of expres... SALMAN RUSHDIE Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plaus... SALMAN RUSHDIE Religion, a mediaeval form of unreason, when combined with modern weaponry becomes a real threat to ... SALMAN RUSHDIE At sixteen, you still think you can escape from your father. You aren't listening to his voice speak... SALMAN RUSHDIE There is a widespread difficulty in the Muslim world, which has to do with how the people are taught... SALMAN RUSHDIE I remember when I was young, many cities in the Muslim world were cosmopolitan cities with a lot of ... SALMAN RUSHDIE There'll be one track that I like and a lot of it that is just wallpaper and sounds the same. SALMAN RUSHDIE Our lives, our stories, flowed into one another's, were no longer our own, individual, discrete. SALMAN RUSHDIE If I were asked for a one-sentence sound bite on religion, I would say I was against it. SALMAN RUSHDIE I used to write a monthly column for the 'New York Times' syndicate. But I stopped because I... SALMAN RUSHDIE If you were an atheist, Birbal," the Emperor challenged his first minister, "what would you say to t... SALMAN RUSHDIE It matters, it always matters, to name rubbish as rubbish … to do otherwise is to legitimize it."<... SALMAN RUSHDIE One of the things I've learnt is not to depend on there being a woman in your life to make it wo... SALMAN RUSHDIE The fundamentalist seeks to bring down a great deal more than buildings. Such people are against, to... SALMAN RUSHDIE Repression is a seamless garment; a society which is authoritarian in its social and sexual codes, w... SALMAN RUSHDIE When a book leaves its author's desk it changes. Even before anyone has read it, before eyes other t... SALMAN RUSHDIE Always do something impossible right at the beginning of the show?. Swallow a sword, tie yourself in... SALMAN RUSHDIE I've tried to live without fear. Fear paralyzes you. I've tried to get on with my life. SALMAN RUSHDIE I've been gradually reclaiming all kinds of freedoms over these years.., SALMAN RUSHDIE Obviously, it is a very great honor and I'm very pleased to have it, and it's very nice to be recogn... SALMAN RUSHDIE I think it's a stupid way to read a book, ... to say that because something happens to one person th... SALMAN RUSHDIE Life is fury, he'd thought. Fury — sexual, Oedipal, political, magical, brutal — drives us to ou... SALMAN RUSHDIE If I were asked for a one-sentence sound bite on religion, I would say I was against it SALMAN RUSHDIE Masks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull. SALMAN RUSHDIE Nobody ever wanted to go to war, but if a war came your way, it might as well be the right war, abou... SALMAN RUSHDIE A question I have often asked is, ‘What would an inoffensive political cartoon look like?’ What ... SALMAN RUSHDIE What one writer can make in the solitude of one room is something no power can easily destroy. SALMAN RUSHDIE Many of us persons of the tinted persuasion care about human rights and artistic freedom too. SALMAN RUSHDIE From such defensive, separated worlds some youngsters have indefensibly stepped across a moral line ... SALMAN RUSHDIE Susan Sontag was a great literary artist,"a fearless and original thinker, ever valiant for truth, a... SALMAN RUSHDIE However, in the end, the question [remains]: Why him and not the man standing next to him? Why did t... SALMAN RUSHDIE The Satanic Verses. SALMAN RUSHDIE Rock and roll music - the music of freedom frightens people and unleashes all manner of conservative... SALMAN RUSHDIE از همان زمان برمن روشن شد که خانواده بهطور ضمنی به اصل... SALMAN RUSHDIE