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Sometimes I think that when people become famous, there's a public perception that they are not human beings any more. They don't have feelings; they don't get hurt; you can act and say as you like about them.
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Matthew Wiener on 'Mad Men' writes the entire series before they start shooting, and if you have that, then what you can do with character and story is not at all unlike what you can do in a novel.
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People are always telling me that they've seen people reading my books on the subway, or the beach, or whenever.
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There was a series called 'Game of Thrones' which was very popular here in the United States, a post-Tolkien kind of thing. It was garbage, yet very addictive garbage - because there's lots of violence, all the women take their clothes off all the time, and it's kind of fun.
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The sixty-minute drama form has become very rich.
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When I'm writing a book, sentence by sentence, I'm not thinking theoretically. I'm just trying to work out the story from inside the characters I've got.
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In early Islam, it was an absolute tenet that the prophet was not to be worshipped. The prophet was a messenger. And one of the things that's happened in Islam is this cult of the prophet, which to my view is counter to the original tradition.
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I'm a big-city boy. What I like is big cities. It's not just what I like. It's what I write about.
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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.
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I think the veil is a way of taking power away from women.
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It may be that the books that were best liked in your lifetime are not the ones that are best liked 100 years later.
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Look at history. It's not the account of a species at peace.
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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.
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When you are making an independent film, money is never an issue.
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I saw Quentin Tarantino's 'Django Unchained,' and you could say a lot of things against it, but it was incredible fun. I don't like blood and gore, and I am very squeamish about violence, but Tarantino's violence is actually funny.
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I'm no friend of Tony Blair's and I consider the Middle East policies of the United States and the UK fatal.
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Discovery is fun. I am incredibly open to everything.
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It's obvious that I come down on the side of free speech for anybody's work.
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Sometimes you find your voice by trying to write like people, and sometimes you find it by trying to write unlike people.
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Doubt, it seems to me, is the central condition of a human being in the twentieth century.
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Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.
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Certainly, poverty and economic decline have a lot to do with the so-called rage of Islam. You've got all these young men in countries which are economically in bad shape. The idea that they might be able to make a good living and get married and have a family, a decent life, seems very remote to a lot of people in a lot of the world.
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I grew up reading 'The Jungle Books' and loving them.
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Before I came to England, my favorite authors were P. G. Wodehouse and Agatha Christie. I used to devour both.