Joseph Anton Quotes

“When...did it become irrational to dislike religion, any religion, even to dislike it vehemently? When did reason get redescribed as unreason? When were the fairy stories of the superstitious placed above criticism, beyond satire? A religion was not a race. It was an idea, and ideas stood (or fell) because they were strong enough (or too weak) to withstand criticism, not because they were shielded from it. Strong ideas welcomed dissent.”
― Salman Rushdie, Joseph Anton: A Memoir

“The lessons one learns at school are not always the ones the school thinks it's teaching.”
― Salman Rushdie, Joseph Anton: A Memoir

“Life is lived forward but is judged in reverse.”
― Salman Rushdie, Joseph Anton: A Memoir

“When a book leaves its author's desk it changes. Even before anyone has read it, before eyes other than its creator's have looked upon a single phrase, it is irretrievably altered. It has become a book that can be read, that no longer belongs to its maker. It has acquired, in a sense, free will. It will make its journey through the world and there is no longer anything the author can do about it. Even he, as he looks at its sentences, reads them differently now that they can be read by others. They look like different sentences. The book has gone out into the world and the world has remade it.”
― Salman Rushdie , Joseph Anton: A Memoir

“He remembered the old Chinese proverb, sometimes ascribed to Confucius: If you sit by the river for long enough, the body of your enemy will float by.”
― Salman Rushdie, Joseph Anton: A Memoir

“All liberty required was that the space for discourse itself be protected. Liberty lay in the argument itself, not the resolution of that argument, in the ability to quarrel, even with the most cherished beliefs of others; a free society was not placid but turbulent. The bazaar of conflicting was the place where freedom rang.”
― Salman Rushdie, Joseph Anton: A Memoir

“Where they burn books they will in the end burn people too.”
― Salman Rushdie, Joseph Anton: A Memoir

“A comfortable prison was still a prison.”
― Salman Rushdie, Joseph Anton: A Memoir

“This unhoused, exiled Satan was perhaps the heavenly patron of all exiles, all unhoused people, all those who were torn from their place and left floating, half-this, half-that, denied the rooted person's comforting, defining sense of having solid ground beneath their feet.”
― Salman Rushdie, Joseph Anton: A Memoir

“Rage made you the creature of those who enraged you, it gave them too much power. Rage killed the mind, and now more than ever the mind needed to live, to find a way of rising above the mindlessness.”
― Salman Rushdie, Joseph Anton: A Memoir

“People retreated behind their front doors into the hidden zone of their private, family worlds and when outsiders asked how things were they answered, Oh, everything’s going along just fine, not much to report, situation normal. But everyone secretly knew that behind that door things were rarely humdrum. More typically, all hell was breaking loose, as people dealt with their angry fathers, drunken mothers, resentful siblings, mad aunts, lecherous uncles and crumbling grandparents. The family was not the firm foundation upon which society rested, but stood at the dark chaotic heart of everything that ailed us. It was not normal, but surreal; not humdrum, but filled with event; not ordinary, but bizarre. He remembered with what excitement he had listened, at the age of twenty, to the Reith Lectures delivered on BBC Radio by Edmund Leach, the great anthropologist and interpreter of Claude Lévi-Strauss who, a year earlier, had succeeded Noel Annan as provost of King’s. “Far from being the basis of the good society,” Leach had said, “the family, with its narrow privacy and tawdry secrets, is the source of all our discontents.” Yes! he thought. Yes! That is a thing I also know. The families in the novels he later wrote would be explosive, operatic, arm-waving, exclamatory, wild. People who did not like his books would sometimes criticize these fictional families for being unrealistic—not “ordinary” enough. However, readers who did like his books said to him, “Those families are exactly like my family.”
― Salman Rushdie, Joseph Anton: A Memoir

“The ruthlessness of the godly invalidated their claims of virtue.”
― Salman Rushdie, Joseph Anton: A Memoir

“He was learning that to win a fight like this, it was not enough to know what one was fighting against. That was easy. He was fighting against the view that people could be killed for their ideas, and against the ability of any religion to place a limiting point on thought. But he needed, now, to be clear of what he was fighting for. Freedom of speech, freedom of the imagination, freedom from fear, and the beautiful, ancient art of which he was privileged to be a practitioner. Also skepticism, irreverence, doubt, satire, comedy, and unholy glee. He would never again flinch from the defense of these things. p. 285”
― Salman Rushdie, Joseph Anton: A Memoir

“When he resigned his boss thought he was asking for more money. 'No,' he said. 'I'm just going to try to be a full-time writer.' Oh, his boss said, you want a lot more money. 'No, really,' he said. 'This isn't a negotiation. I'm just giving you my thirty days' notice. Thirty-one days from now, I won't be coming in.' Hmm, his boss replied. I don't think we can give you as much money as that.”
― Salman Rushdie, Joseph Anton: A Memoir

“To grow up steeped in these tellings was to learn two unforgettable lessons: first, that stories were not true (there were no "real" genies in bottles or flying carpets or wonderful lamps), but by being untrue they could make him feel and know truths that the truth could not tell him, and second, that they all belonged to him, just as they belonged to his father, Anis, and to everyone else, they were all his, as they were hsi father's, bright stories and dark stories, sacred stories and profane, his to alter and renew and discard and pick up again as and when he pleased, his to laugh at and rejoice in and live in and with and by, to give the stories life by loving them and to be given life in return. Man was the storytelling animal, the only creature on earth that told itself stories to understand what kind of creature it was. The story was his birthright, and nobody could take it away.”
― Salman Rushdie, Joseph Anton: A Memoir

“Nobody ever wanted to go to war, but if a war came your way, it might as well be the right war, about the most important things in the world, and you might as well, if you were going to fight it, be called "Rushdie," and stand where your father had placed you, in the tradition of the grand Aristotelian, Averroës, Abul Walid Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Rushd.”
― Salman Rushdie, Joseph Anton: A Memoir

“One foreign correspondent came up to be friendly. He asked this man what he should think about what Khomeini had said. How seriously should he take it? Was it just a rhetorical flourish or something genuinely dangerous? “Oh, don’t worry too much,” the journalist said. “Khomeini sentences the president of the United States to death every Friday afternoon.”
― Salman Rushdie, Joseph Anton: A Memoir

“...one could accept Muhammad as a genuine mystic—just as one could accept Joan of Arc's voices as having genuinely been heard by her, or the revelations of Saint John the Divine as being that troubled soul's 'real' experiences—without needing also to accept that, had one been standing next to the Prophet of Islam on Mount Hira that day, one would also have seen the Archangel.”
― Salman Rushdie, Joseph Anton: A Memoir

“Enough of invisibility, silence, timidity, defensiveness, guilt! An invisible, silenced man was an empty space into which others could pour their prejudices, their agendas, their wrath. The fight against fanaticism needed visible faces, audible voices. He would be quiet no longer. He would try to become a loud and visible man.”
― Salman Rushdie, Joseph Anton: A Memoir

“Human life was rarely shapely, only intermittently meaningful, its clumsiness the inevitable consequence of the victory of content over form, of what and when over how and why.”
― Salman Rushdie, Joseph Anton: A Memoir

“Rage made you the creature of those who enraged you, it gave them to much power. Rage killed the mind...”
― Salman Rushdie, Joseph Anton: A Memoir

“Man is the storytelling animal, the only creature on earth that told itself stories to understand what kind of creature it was. The story was his birthright, and nobody could take it away.”
― Salman Rushdie, Joseph Anton: A Memoir

“At the beginning of their work together Arthur Hibbert gave him a piece of advice he never forgot. “You must never write history,” Hibbert said, “until you can hear the people speak.” He thought about that for years, and in the end it came to feel like a valuable guiding principle for fiction as well. If you didn’t have a sense of how people spoke, you didn’t know them well enough, and so you couldn’t—you shouldn’t—tell their story.”
― Salman Rushdie, Joseph Anton: A Memoir

“... free speech isn't absolute. We have the freedoms we fight for and we lose those we don't defend.”
― Salman Rushdie, Joseph Anton: A Memoir

“But then the subject turned to the spiritual life and Meg talked about her many visits to ashrams in India and her admiration for Swami Muktananda and Gurumayi. That got in the way, especially because he told her of his skepticism regarding the guru industry, and suggested she might profitably read Gita Mehta’s book Karma Cola. “Why are you so cynical?” she asked him, as if she genuinely wanted to know the answer, and he said that if you grew up in India it was easy to conclude that these people were fakes. “Yes, of course there are lots of charlatans,” she said, reasonably, “but can’t you discriminate?” He shook his head sadly. “No,” he said. “No, I can’t.” That was the end of their chat.”
― Salman Rushdie, Joseph Anton: A Memoir

“It was always women who did the choosing, and men's place was to be grateful if they were lucky enough to be the chosen ones. Joseph Anton”
― Salman Rushdie, Joseph Anton: A Memoir

“Rowan (Atkinson) pochmurně přikyvoval a dodal, že nedávno v jednom televizním skeči použil záznam klečících muslimů při páteční modlitbě, podle něj v Teheránu, s následujícím komentářem:" A pátrání po ájatolláhově kontaktní čočce pokračuje.”
― Salman Rushdie, Joseph Anton: A Memoir

“Paul Theroux was sitting in the pew (at Bruce Chatwin's memorial service) behind him. “I suppose we’ll be here for you next week, Salman,” he said.”
― Salman Rushdie, Joseph Anton: A Memoir

“The questions he knew how to answer were not about place or roots, but about love. Who do you love? What can you leave behind, and what do you need to hold on to? Where does your heart feel full?”
― Salman Rushdie, Joseph Anton: A Memoir

“Their true characters were shown not in the war they fought, but in the peace they made.”
― Salman Rushdie, Joseph Anton: A Memoir