Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
To understand just one life you have to swallow the world ... do you wonder, then, that I was a heavy child?
Writers have an opinion about the world and offer arguments about the world. They should offer contemplation.
I have been a film buff all my life and believe that the finest cinema is fully the equal of the best novels.
I had a very difficult relationship with my father, which ended up okay, but there were many difficult years.
One of the things a writer is for is to say the unsayable, speak the unspeakable and ask difficult questions.
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.
One of the characteristics of mudslinging is that mud sticks if it's thrown with enough force for long enough.
Before I came to England, my favorite authors were P. G. Wodehouse and Agatha Christie. I used to devour both.
In the real world, immeasurable hurt is caused by terrorists based in Pakistan who attack countries like India.
Sometimes writing a novel is not unlike having a baby. You'd have to ask a female novelist to compare the pain.
Sometimes, people trying to commit suicide manage it in a manner that leaves them breathless with astonishment.
People are always telling me that they've seen people reading my books on the subway, or the beach, or whenever.
It is commonly and, I believe, accurately said of Pakistan that her women are much more impressive than her men.
'The Satanic Verses' was denied the ordinary life of a novel. It became something smaller and uglier: an insult.
Religion, a mediaeval form of unreason, when combined with modern weaponry becomes a real threat to our freedoms.
The reason why books endure is because there are enough people who like them. It's the only reason why books last.
The only way to find out why someone decides to engage in armed combat is to look at their individual personality.
I've never had very high regard for therapists. I owe my health, my mental survival, to my friends and loved ones.
Free speech is not just free speech for people you admire. It's also for people who you think of as reprehensible.
It's always been colossally important to me that my books should be well received in India. It's where I come from.
Bread and books: food for the body and food for the soul - what could be more worthy of our respect, and even love?
In television, the 60-minute series, 'The Wire' and 'Mad Men' and so on, the writer is the primary creative artist.
Dissensions between Muslim nations run at least as deep, if not deeper, than those nations' resentment of the West.
Mo Yan is the Chinese equivalent of the Soviet Russian apparatchik writer Mikhail Sholokhov: a patsy of the regime.
All my adult life, if I didn't have several hours a day to sit in a room by myself, I would get antsy and irritable.
It may be that the books that were best liked in your lifetime are not the ones that are best liked 100 years later.
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.
One of the strange things about violent and authoritarian regimes is they don't like the glare of negative publicity.
An attack upon our ability to tell stories is not just censorship - it is a crime against our nature as human beings.
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.
Question: What is the opposite of faith? Not disbelief. Too final, certain, closed. Itself is a kind of belief. Doubt.
The only thing worse than a bad review from the Ayatollah Khomeini would be a good review from the Ayatollah Khomeini.
perhaps, if one wishes to remain an individual in the midst of the teeming multitudes, one must make oneself grotesque.
Rock and roll music - the music of freedom frightens people and unleashes all manner of conservative defense mechanisms.
The frustrating part of being tagged 'controversial' is people go looking for trouble where there isn't any to look for.
Sometimes you find your voice by trying to write like people, and sometimes you find it by trying to write unlike people.
I am clearly vulnerable to these more passionate and volatile unstable relationships. I am trying to not be so vulnerable.
A thing that happens to migrants is that they lose many of the traditional things which root identity, which root the self.
It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity.
No people whose word for 'yesterday' is the same as their word for 'tomorrow' can be said to have a firm grip on the time.
Something was badly amiss with the spiritual life of the planet...Too many demons inside people claiming to believe in God.
That's the trouble with you sad-city types: a place has to be miserable and dull as ditchwater before you believe it's real.
In this world without quiet corners, there can be no easy escapes from history, from hullabaloo, from terrible, unquiet fuss.
Bin Laden was born filthy rich and died in a rich man's house, which he had painstakingly built to the highest specifications.
The world is full of things that upset people. But most of us deal with it and move on and don't try and burn the planet down.
I think that England made a very big, historical mistake to allow itself to become the kind of terrorist capital of the world.
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.
The Muslim population in India is, largely speaking, not radicalised. From the beginning, they were always very secular-minded.
All art began as sacred art, you know? I mean, all painting began as religious painting. All writing began as religious writing.
I don't think there really is much of a left in America, certainly by European standards even the left is quite right wing here.