Great Throughts Treasury

"Our lives are not what we deserve; they are, let us agree, in many ways deficient."

"Only under extreme pressure can we change into that which it is in our most profound nature to become."

"Our lives teach us who we are. I have learned the hard way that when you permit anyone else's description of reality to supplant your own — and such descriptions have been raining down on me, from security advisers, governments, journalists, Archbishops, friends, enemies, mullahs — then you might as well be dead. Obviously, a rigid, blinkered, absolutist world view is the easiest to keep hold of, whereas the fluid, uncertain, metamorphic picture I've always carried about is rather more vulnerable. Yet I must cling with all my might to … my own soul; must hold on to its mischievous, iconoclastic, out-of-step clown-instincts, no matter how great the storm. And if that plunges me into contradiction and paradox, so be it; I've lived in that messy ocean all my life. I've fished in it for my art. This turbulent sea was the sea outside my bedroom window in Bombay. It is the sea by which I was born, and which I carry within me wherever I go."

"Our lives disconnect and reconnect, we move on, and later we may again touch one another, again bounce away. This is the felt shape of a human life, neither simply linear nor wholly disjunctive nor endlessly bifurcating, but rather this bouncey-castle sequence of bumpings-into and tumblings-apart."

"Perhaps the story you finish is never the one you begin."

"Realism can break a writer's heart."

"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 incredible."

"Question: What is the opposite of faith?"

"Shame is like everything else; live with it for long enough and it becomes part of the furniture."

"Some incredibly important things were being fought for here ... the freedom of the imagination, the great, overwhelming, overarching question of freedom of speech, the right of human beings to walk down the streets of their own country without fear."

"Rock and roll music - the music of freedom frightens people and unleashes all manner of conservative defense mechanisms."

"So India’s problem turns out to be the world’s problem. What happened in India has happened in God’s name."

"Somebody always went in the house first, to check it out."

"So Oz finally became home; the imagined world became the actual world, as it does for us all, because the truth is that once we have left our childhood places and started out to make our own lives, armed only with what we have and are, we understand that the real secret of the ruby slippers is not that there's no place like home, but rather that there is no longer such a place as home: except, of course, for the homes we make, or the homes that are made for us, in Oz, which is anywhere and everywhere, except the place from which we began."

"Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts."

"Something was badly amiss with the spiritual life of the planet...Too many demons inside people claiming to believe in God."

"Susan Sontag was a great literary artist, a fearless and original thinker, ever valiant for truth, and an indefatigable ally in many struggles."

"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."

"That is what people get wrong about transformation. We're not all shallow proteans, forever shifting shape. We're not science fiction. It's like when coal becomes diamond. It doesn't afterwards retain the possibility of change. Squeeze it as hard as you like, it won't turn into a rubber ball, or a Quattro Stagione pizza, or a self-portrait by Rembrandt. It's done."

"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."

"The liveliness of literature lies in its exceptionality, in being the individual, idiosyncratic vision of one human being, in which, to our delight and great surprise, we may find our own vision reflected."

"'That's the right answer.' And he said, 'If there's anything you would like to ask me about my writing, I would be happy to reply.' I think the little bastard might well be a writer!"

"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."

"The book is not the crime. The fatwa was the crime,"

"The history of life was not the bumbling progress — the very English, middle-class progress — Victorian thought had wanted it to be, but violent, a thing of dramatic, cumulative transformations: in the old formulation, more revolution than evolution."

"The human condition, but what of the angelic? Halfway between Allah-god and homosap, did they ever doubt? They did: challenging God's will one day they hid muttering beneath the Throne, daring to ask forbidden things: anti-questions. Is it right that. Could it not be argued. Freedom, the old antiquest. He calmed them down, naturally, employing management skills a la god. Flattered them: you will be the instruments of my will on earth, the salvation-damnation of man, all the usual etcetera. And hey presto, the end of protest, on with the haloes, back to work. Angels are easily pacified; turn them into instruments and they'll play your harpy tune. Human beings are tougher nuts, can doubt anything, even the evidence of their own eyes. Of being-their-own-eyes. Of what, as they sink heavy-lidded, transpires behind closed peepers ... angels, they don't have much in the way of a will. To will is to disagree; not to submit; to dissent."

"The exclusion of Professor Ramadan illustrates that the Patriot Act and other post 9/11 laws and policies may be serving to increase American isolation at a time when international dialogue is more critical than ever."

"The former colonial powers were drawing lines all over the world. And many of the ills of the world since then are the consequence of those acts."

"The novel does not seek to establish a privileged language but it insists upon the freedom to portray and analyze the struggle between the different contestants for such privileges."

"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 only people who see the whole picture… are the ones who step outside the frame."

"The only privilege literature deserves - and this privilege it requires in order to exist - is the privilege of being in the arena of discourse, the place where the struggle of our languages can be acted out."

"The problem’s name is God."

"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 adventure in 'Moby Dick' is the one that happens inside Captain Ahab. The rest is a fishing trip."

"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'll be one track that I like and a lot of it that is just wallpaper and sounds the same."

"The world, somebody wrote, is the place we prove real by dying in it."

"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,"

"This looks like it's over. It means everything, it means freedom."

"Those who oppose the novel most vociferously today are of the opinion that intermingling with a different culture will inevitably weaken and ruin their own. I am of the opposite opinion. The Satanic Verses celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs. It rejoices in mongrelization and fears the absolutism of the Pure. Melange, hotchpotch, a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the world. It is the great possibility that mass migration gives the world… The Satanic Verses is for change-by-fusion, change-by-conjoining. It is a love song to our mongrel selves."

"To understand just one life you have to swallow the world ... do you wonder, then, that I was a heavy child?"

"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."

"Vertigo is the conflict between the fear of falling and the desire to fall."

"We all owe death a life."

"Too many people had spent too long demonizing or totemizing me to listen seriously to what I had to say. In the West, some friends turned against me, calling me by yet another set of insulting names. Now I was spineless, pathetic, debased; I had betrayed myself, my Cause; above all, I had betrayed them . I also found myself up against the granite, heartless certainties of Actually Existing Islam, by which I mean the political and priestly power structure that presently dominates and stifles Muslim societies. Actually Existing Islam has failed to create a free society anywhere on Earth, and it wasn't about to let me, of all people, argue in favor of one."

"To make convincing such a huge change in a single human life."