When you pray for what you most want in the world, its opposite comes along with it. I was given a woman whom I truly loved and who truly loved me. T… - Salman Rushdie

Can one drown in one's element... If fish can drown in water, can human beings suffocate in air?

Those who oppose the novel most vociferously today are of the opinion that intermingling with a different culture will inevitably weaken and ruin their own. I am of the opposite opinion. The Satanic Verses celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs. It rejoices in mongrelization and fears the absolutism of the Pure. Melange, hotchpotch, a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the world. It is the great possibility that mass migration gives the world... The Satanic Verses is for change-by-fusion, change-by-conjoining. It is a love song to our mongrel selves.

The actor's life offers, on a daily basis, the simulacrum of love; a mask can be satisfied, or at least consoled, by the echo of what it seeks.