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.
If you hear somebody say something absolutely horrendous about their own life, in quite a flippant, offbeat kind of way, when you meet people clearly trying to be strong and brave, the ones who are really good at it are the ones who break my heart the most.
Sex means nothing--just the moment of ecstasy, that flares and dies in minutes.
Apparently, the most difficult feat for a Cambridge male is to accept a woman not merely as feeling, not merely as thinking, but as managing a complex, vital interweaving of both.
The big rule is that you must never get mixed up with a married man - never even look sideways at another woman's fella. Boy, I really was terrific at obeying that rule, wasn't I?
The majority of my interactions with police were not good. There were a few good ones who were actually protecting the community. But then you have ones from the Valley. They never met me in their life, but since I'm a kid in basketball shorts and a white T-shirt, they wanna slam me on the hood of the car. Sixteen years old.
Guys are great before you know who they are,' said Lucy. 'They're great when you're still with who they might be.
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