If you want to tell the untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you've got to find a language. Which goes for film as well as prose, for documentary as well as autobiography. Use the wrong language, and you're dumb and blind.
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Not even the visionary or mystical experience ever lasts very long. It is for art to capture that experience, to offer it to, in the case of l...
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Woe to that nation whose literature is cut short by the intrusion of force. This is not merely interference with freedom of the press but the sealing up of a nation's heart, the excision of its memory.
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Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, the power to retell it, rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change, truly are powerless, because they cannot think new thoughts.
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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.
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I used to say: there is a God-shaped hole in me. For a long time I stressed the absence, the hole. Now I find it is the shape which has become more important.
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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.
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A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it or offer your own version in return.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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One of the extraordinary things about human events is that the unthinkable becomes thinkable.
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A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return.
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If Woody Allen were a Muslim, he'd be dead by now.
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Our lives teach us who we are.
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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.
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Your blasphemy, Salman, can't be forgiven. To set your words against the Words of God.
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Where there is no belief, there is no blasphemy.
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When thought becomes excessively painful, action is the finest remedy.
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