I've never had very high regard for therapists. I owe my health, my mental survival, to my friends and loved ones.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of friends and loved ones in maintaining mental health over professional help.
Salman Rushdie expresses a personal belief that the support and care of friends and loved ones have been more crucial to his mental well-being than traditional therapy. This perspective highlights the value of personal relationships in managing one's mental health and suggests that emotional connections can play a vital role in survival during challenging times.
In practice
During a speech on mental health awareness, I might quote Rushdie to emphasize the role of personal connections in healing.
I've been fascinated by Machiavelli since I was very young. I've always felt that he had a bad rap from history, and that he was actually a person quite unlike what we now think of as Machiavellian. He was a republican. He disliked totalitarian government.
Killing people because you don't like their ideas - it's a bad thing.
faith without doubt is addiction
I am clearly vulnerable to these more passionate and volatile unstable relationships. I am trying to not be so vulnerable.
In India, as elsewhere in our darkening world, religion is the poison in the blood. Where religion intervenes, mere innocence is no excuse. Yet we go on skating around this issue, speaking of religion in the fashionable language of 'respect.' What is there to respect in any of this, or in any of the crimes now being committed almost daily around the world in religion's dreaded name?
Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems - but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible.
I don't go on that many dates, because the truth is, anytime you go out in public with a girl when you're well-known, there are pictures of you everywhere, and it's like you're a thing.
Women are not in love with me but with the picture of me on the screen. I am merely the canvas on which women paint their dreams.
Affection is the most important thing. And the quality of affection - with your friends, your lovers, your family. But particularly for your own generation.
Nearly forty years ago, a distinguished Prime Minister of this country ... said, 'They may not be angels but they are at least our friends.'* I must say that I do not think that we probably demonstrated in that forty years that we are angels yet, but I hope we have demonstrated that we are at least friends.
We hurt people that love us, love people that hurt us
He is mad, bad and dangerous to know.
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