An attack upon our ability to tell stories is not just censorship - it is a crime against our nature as human beings.
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.
Killing people because you don't like their ideas - it's a bad thing.
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.
India is my kid sister.
Go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets. Take a deep breath before you begin talking. Aim for the stars. Keep grinning. Be bloody-minded. Argue with the world. And never forget that writing is as close as we get to keeping a hold on the thousand and one things--childhood, certainties, cities, doubts, dreams, instants, phrases, parents, loves--that go on slipping , like sand, through our fingers.
The history of a culture can be determined by its untranslatable words.
In the cookie of life, friends are the chocolate chips.
Peace, perfect peace, in this dark world of sin? The Blood of Jesus whispers peace within.
Your blasphemy, Salman, can't be forgiven. To set your words against the Words of God.
Until you know who you are you can’t write.
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.
Literature is the one place in any society where, within the secrecy of our own heads, we can hear voices talking about everything in every possible way.
From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable.
Ignorantly is how we all fall in love; for it is a kind of fall. Closing our eyes, we leap from that cliff in hope of a soft landing. Nor is it always soft; but still, without that leap nobody comes to life.
What kind of idea are you? Are you the kind that compromises, does deals, accomodates itself to society, aims to find a niche, to survive; or are you the cussed, bloody-minded, ramrod-backed type of damnfool notion that would rather break than sway with the breeze? – The kind that will almost certainly, ninety-nine times out of hundred, be smashed to bits; but, the hundredth time, will change the world.
What kind of Christmas present would Jesus ask Santa for?
A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.
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.
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.
Religion, a mediaeval form of unreason, when combined with modern weaponry becomes a real threat to our freedoms. This religious totalitarianism has caused a deadly mutation in the heart of Islam and we see the tragic consequences in Paris today. 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. 'Respect for religion' has become a code phrase meaning 'fear of religion.' Religions, like all other ideas, deserve criticism, satire, and, yes, our fearless disrespect.
For every snake, there is a ladder; for every ladder,a snake
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.
Well, we're still in the middle of it. And it doesn't show any sign of going away. And these attacks that were - that seemed so odd at the time, with "Satanic Verses," because we didn't have any context for this. You know, where did that come from? It seemed to come out of nowhere.
If you're offended, it's your problem.
Good advice is rarer than rubies.
Where there is no belief, there is no blasphemy.
We were language's magpies by nature, stealing whatever sounded bright and shiny.
It matters, it always matters, to name rubbish as rubbish; that to do otherwise is to legitimize it.
Even when things are at their worst, there's a little voice in your head saying, 'Good story!'
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.
In general, writers shouldn't be killed for what they write, though I can think of exceptions.
The lessons one learns at school are not always the ones the school thinks it's teaching.
Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.
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.
Fundamentalism isn't about religion, it's about power.
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?
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.
If Woody Allen were a Muslim, he'd be dead by now.
Too many people spouting too many words, and in the end those words will turn to bullets and stones.
How do you defeat terrorism? Don’t be terrorized.
faith without doubt is addiction
Stories in families are colossally important. Every family has stories: some funny, some proud, some embarrassing, some shameful. Knowing them is proof of belonging to the family.
A mature society understands that at the heart of democracy is argument.
Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination and of the heart.
He knew what he knew: that the real world was full of magic, so magical worlds could easily be real.
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.
You can't have modern states based on ideas which have been out of date for a thousand years.
Discovery is fun. I am incredibly open to everything.
I don't think there is a need for an entity like God in my life.
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.
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.
Once you put a thought into the world, it can be disagreed with, but it can't be unthought.
Between the adored and the adorer falls the shadow.
Fundamentalists of all faiths are the fundamental evil of our time.
We cannot allow religious hooligans to place limiting points on thought.
If the creative artist worries if he will still be free tomorrow, then he will not be free today.
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.
People can do bad things with free speech as well as good. You have to defend the Ku Klux Klan as well as Martin Luther King. It's like that. If you're going to defend the principle, then you have to defend people who use the principle badly.
Masks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull.
Free speech is not just free speech for people you admire. It's also for people who you think of as reprehensible.
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.
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.
Speaking as somebody with three sisters and a very largely female Muslim family, there is not a single woman I know in my family or in their friends who would have accepted the wearing of a veil.
If somebody's trying to shut you up, sing louder, and if possible, better.
It is very, very easy not to be offended by a book. You just have to shut it.
Home is the place where you feel happy.
One of the things a writer is for is to say the unsayable, speak the unspeakable and ask difficult questions.
Religion, a mediaeval form of unreason, when combined with modern weaponry becomes a real threat to our freedoms. This religious totalitarianism has caused a deadly mutation in the heart of Islam and we see the tragic consequences in Paris today.
I've never seen anywhere in the world as beautiful as Kashmir. It has something to do with the fact that the valley is very small and the mountains are very big, so you have this miniature countryside surrounded by the Himalayas, and it's just spectacular. And it's true, the people are very beautiful too.
What one writer can make in the solitude of one room is something no power can easily destroy.
Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.
Our lives, our stories, flowed into one another's, were no longer our own, individual, discrete.
Friendships are the family we make - not the one we inherit. I've always been someone to whom friendship, elective affinities, is as important as family.
Realism can break a writer's heart.
Even the Islam stuff I thought was pretty respectful about Islam in a funny way. I mean, yes, from a secular point of view, but it talks about the birth of this religion, and I thought it was pretty admiring of the person at the center of it, the prophet of Islam.
Something was badly amiss with the spiritual life of the planet...Too many demons inside people claiming to believe in God.
Originality is dangerous. It challenges, questions, overturns assumptions, unsettles moral codes.
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.
One of the strange things about violent and authoritarian regimes is they don't like the glare of negative publicity.
Two things form the bedrock of any open society - freedom of expression and rule of law. If you don't have those things, you don't have a free country.
Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true.
I grew up kissing books and bread.
Bread and books: food for the body and food for the soul - what could be more worthy of our respect, and even love?
I have no problem with people's religious beliefs. I just don't happen to have any.
Our lives teach us who we are.
What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.
All names mean something.
We all owe death a life.
I'll tell you what divorce hasn't taught me. It didn't teach me not to get married again.
Fundamentalists believe that we don't believe in anything. In their view of the world, they are in possession of absolute certainties, while we are descending into decadence. We will be able to triumph over terrorism not by waging war on it, but through a conscious, fearless way of life.
My parents gave me the gift of irreligion, of growing up without bothering to ask people what gods they held dear, assuming that in fact, like my parents, they weren't interested in gods, and that this uninterest was 'normal.' You may argue that the gift was a poisoned chalice, but even if so, that's a cup from which I'd happily drink again.
I stand with Charlie Hebdo, as we all must, to defend the art of satire.
‘Respect for religion’ has become a code phrase meaning ‘fear of religion.’ Religions, like all other ideas, deserve criticism, satire, and, yes, our fearless disrespect.
Freedom to reject is the only freedom.
The moment you declare a set of ideas to be immune from criticism, satire, derision, or contempt, freedom of thought becomes impossible.
There are things you break that can't be put back together again. And Kashmir may be one of them.
What can't be cured must be endured.
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.
'The Satanic Verses' was denied the ordinary life of a novel. It became something smaller and uglier: an insult.
Liberate yourself, because no one else is going to liberate you
So India’s problem turns out to be the world’s problem. What happened in India has happened in God’s name. The problem’s name is God.
A book is not completed till it's read.
When...did it become irrational to dislike religion, any religion, even to dislike it vehemently? When did reason get redescribed as unreason? When were the fairy stories of the superstitious placed above criticism, beyond satire? A religion was not a race. It was an idea, and ideas stood (or fell) because they were strong enough (or too weak) to withstand criticism, not because they were shielded from it. Strong ideas welcomed dissent.
Perhaps the story you finish is never the one you begin.
I admit it: above all things, I fear absurdity.
I've been worrying about God a little bit lately... It seems like he's been in a bad mood. And I think it has to do with the quality of lovers he's been getting.
I do not need the idea of God to explain the world I live in.
With death comes honesty.
The problem's name is God.
Reality is a question of perspective.
Sometimes when you finish a book, you don't know quite what you've got.
I didn't become a writer to write about me.
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.
We are the storytelling animal.
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.
God, Satan, Paradise, and Hell all vanished one day in my fifteenth year, when I quite abruptly lost my faith. ... and afterwards, to prove my new-found atheism, I bought myself a rather tasteless ham sandwich, and so partook for the first time of the forbidden flesh of the swine. No thunderbolt arrived to strike me down. ... From that day to this I have thought of myself as a wholly secular person.
To understand just one life you have to swallow the world ... do you wonder, then, that I was a heavy child?
I hate admitting that my enemies have a point.
The only people who see the whole picture,' he murmured, 'are the ones who step out of the frame.
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.
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.
The world, somebody wrote, is the place we prove real by dying in it.
Sometimes great, banned works defy the censor's description and impose themselves on the world - 'Ulysses,' 'Lolita,' the 'Arabian Nights.'
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.
