Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
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.
YouTube is full of pieces of trash. If you want to look on YouTube and find something that insults you, you can probably find it.
I do not envy people who think they have a complete explanation of the world, for the simple reason that they are obviously wrong.
The whole story of migration and what that has done in interconnecting the planet is obviously something I've written about a lot.
In today's US, it's possible for almost anyone - women, gays, African-Americans, Jews - to run for, and be elected to, high office.
I don't like books that play to the gallery, but I've become more concerned with telling a story as clearly and engagingly as I can.
The Republicans were not always insane. They might've had politics I didn't agree with, but they weren't always actually certifiable.
Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory.
In today's U.S., it's possible for almost anyone - women, gays, African-Americans, Jews - to run for, and be elected to, high office.
You can find shame in every house, burning in an ashtray, hanging framed upon a wall, covering a bed. But nobody notices it any more.
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.
[...] the inevitable triumph of illusion over reality that was the single most obvious truth about the history of the human race [...]
The Christian Coalition is still about Christianity, even if it's an idea of Christianity that many Christians might not go along with.
The world is about the way in which our dreams intersect with our real life. Endlessly, the world of the imagination changes the world.
The moment you declare a set of ideas to be immune from criticism, satire, derision, or contempt, freedom of thought becomes impossible.
A poet's work is to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.
A little bit of one story joins onto an idea from another, and hey presto, . . . not old tales but new ones. Nothing comes from nothing.
It seems that the right of freedom of speech that was enshrined in numerous constitutions is now under attack by religious institutions.
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.
Terror is glamour - not only, but also. I am firmly convinced that there's something like a fascination with death among suicide bombers.
A novel, I think, is partly about the contemporary and partly about the eternal, and it's the balance of that that's difficult to achieve.
If a birth is the fall-out from the explosion caused by the union of two unstable elements, then perhaps a half-life is all we can expect.
My friend Lou Reed came to the end of his song. So very sad.But hey, Lou, you'll always take a walk on the wild side. Always a perfect day.
I am gagged and imprisoned. I can't even speak. I want to kick a football in a park with my son. Ordinary, banal life: my impossible dream.
Sometimes great, banned works defy the censor's description and impose themselves on the world - 'Ulysses,' 'Lolita,' the 'Arabian Nights.'
There is a point beyond which conciliation looks like capitulation. I do not believe I passed that point, but others have thought otherwise.
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.
I make no complaint. I am a writer. I do not accept my condition; I will strive to change it; but I inhabit it, I am trying to learn from it.
There needs to be a thorough examination, by Muslims everywhere, of why it is that the faith they love breeds so many violent mutant strains.
I am on Facebook, but mainly as a way to spy on my children. I find out more about them from their Facebook pages than from what they tell me.
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.
Nothing comes from nothing, Thieflet; no story comes from nowhere; new stories are born from old--it is the new combinations that make them new.
He had picked up languages the way most sailors pick up diseases; languages were his gonorrhoea, his syphilis, his scurvy, his ague, his plague.
India, the new myth--a collective fiction in which anything was possible, a fable rivalled only by the two other mighty fantasies: money and God.
I think it's a very important function of art to challenge accepted reality, especially when that reality is created by powerful interest groups.
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.
What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry.
Many men start being friendly with women because they are trying to seduce them. I'm not trying to seduce them. I just like hanging out with them.
One of the things I've thought about 'Midnight's Children' is that it is a novel which puts a Muslim family at the centre of the Indian experience.
I think that a lot of us, whether we are religious or not - there are no words to express some things except religious words. For instance, 'soul.'
Censorship is the thing that stops you doing what you want to do, and what writers want to talk about is what they do, not what stops them doing it.
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.
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.
If I had simply wanted to trade on an insult to Islam, I could have done it in a sentence rather than writing a 250,000-word novel, a work of fiction.
It's fun to read things when you don't know all the words. Even children love it... they come up against weird words, and the weird words excite them.
Home has become such a scattered, damaged, various concept in our present travails. There is so much to yearn for. There are so few rainbows any more.
When you start writing about the stuff that is the central experience of your own life, you can talk about whatever you want, in whatever way you want.
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.
In the experience of art, time seems not to exist. When I'm writing and think, "I've been working for two hours," I've actually been working for seven.
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.