The other thing that prevents people standing up, ... is a kind of cultural defensiveness. The kind of not-washing-your-dirty-linen-in-public argument. That we in the Muslim world are under attack. And, as a result, we put up defenses. And we don't criticize even the worst people in the family. Because if it's your family, and you happen to have an idiot child, you don't tell the world it's an idiot child. |
The people in India do not think of the gods as abstractions. They think of them as real beings who move amongst them and work upon their lives every day. If you have something that you need, if somebody is sick, if a child needs to get into college or whatever it may be, you would go and find the relevant deity to make the offering to and you would believe that that would increase your chances of getting what you needed in life. |
The real risks for any artist are taken in pushing the work to the limits of what is possible, in the attempt to increase the sum of what it is possible to think. Books become good when they go to this edge and risk falling over it /when they endanger the artist by reason of what he has, or has not, artistically dared. |
The Satanic Verses. |
The spirit of my grandfather came to infuse the spirit of the place. |
The world is now so interpenetrated, |
There were times when you would pick up the phone and have people there saying we know where you live and we are going to get you. But on the whole, it became a way of life and you get used to it, |
There'll be one track that I like and a lot of it that is just wallpaper and sounds the same. |
This looks like it's over. It means everything, it means freedom. |
Throughout human history, the apostles of purity, those who have claimed to possess a total explanation, have wrought havoc among mere mixed-up human beings. |
to make convincing such a huge change in a single human life. |
Vertigo is the conflict between the fear of falling and the desire to fall. |
wants the dreadful, wants to stare down the human race's worst-case scenarios. |
We must conclude that it is not only a particular political ideology that has failed, but the idea that men and women could ever define themselves in terms that exclude their spiritual needs. |
What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry. |