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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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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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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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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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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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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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I think the veil is a way of taking power away from women.
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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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The sixty-minute drama form has become very rich.
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Look at history. It's not the account of a species at peace.
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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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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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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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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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Discovery is fun. I am incredibly open to everything.
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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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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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It's obvious that I come down on the side of free speech for anybody's work.
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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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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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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.