“It is a funny view of the world that a book can cause riots.”
(When asked if he apprehended riots) Interview with Shrabani Basu (September 1988), quoted in Elst, Koenraad (2001). Decolonizing the Hindu mind: Ideological development of Hindu revivalism. New Delhi: Rupa. p. 32
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Salman Rushdie 122
British Indian novelist and essayist 1947Related quotes
Source: Rivers of London (2011; American edition title: Midnight Riot), Chapter 12, “The Last Resort” (p. 268)
“A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.”
Letter (6 December 1924); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker
The argument is really no better than that.
"The First-cause Argument"
1920s, Why I Am Not a Christian (1927)
Letter to Elizabeth Otis (1938), as quoted in Conversations with John Steinbeck (1988) edited by Thomas Fensch, p. 37
Context: I must go over into the interior valleys. … There are five thousand families starving to death over there, not just hungry but actually starving. The government is trying to feed them and get medical attention to them, with the Fascist group of utilities and banks and huge growers sabotaging the thing all along the line, and yelling for a balanced budget. In one tent there were twenty people quarantined for small pox and two of the women are to have babies in that tent this week. I've tied into the thing from the first and I must get down there and see it and see if I can do something to knock these murderers on the heads.
Do you know what they're afraid of? They think that if these people are allowed to live in camps with proper sanitary facilities they will organize, and that is the bugbear of the large landowner and the corporate farmer. The states and counties will give them nothing because they are outsiders. But the crops of any part of this state could not be harvested without them. … The death of children by starvation in our valleys is simply staggering. … I'll do what I can. … Funny how mean and little books become in the face of such tragedies.
Source: Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo (1972), p. 75.
As quoted in "Terrorism: How the West Can Win" (1987), Awakeǃ, 1/8.
1980s
“The learning process is something you can incite, literally incite, like a riot.”