A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.

One of the extraordinary things about human events is that the unthinkable becomes thinkable.

Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.

It is very, very easy not to be offended by a book. You just have to shut it.

In this world without quiet corners, there can be no easy escapes from history, from hullabaloo, from terrible, unquiet fuss.

Names, once they are in common use, quickly become mere sounds, their etymology being buried, like so many of the earth's marvels, beneath the dust of habit.

Most of what matters in your life takes place in your absence.

Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.

If Woody Allen were a Muslim, he'd be dead by now.

If I were asked for a one-sentence sound bite on religion, I would say I was against it.

Such is the miraculous nature of the future of exiles: what is first uttered in the impotence of an overheated apartment becomes the fate of nations.

What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry.

The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas - uncertainty, progress, change - into crimes.

Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts.

Our lives are not what we deserve; they are, let us agree, in many ways deficient.

The acceptance that all that is solid has melted into the air, that reality and morality are not givens but imperfect human constructs, is the point from which fiction begins.

I used to say, 'There is a God-shaped hole in me.' For a long time I stressed the absence, the hole. Now I find it is the shape which has become more important.

A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return.

Vertigo is the conflict between the fear of falling and the desire to fall.

Doubt, it seems to me, is the central condition of a human being in the twentieth century.

I hate admitting that my enemies have a point.

Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory.

What one writer can make in the solitude of one room is something no power can easily destroy.

What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.

Throughout human history, the apostles of purity, those who have claimed to possess a total explanation, have wrought havoc among mere mixed-up human beings.

A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.

Rock and roll music - the music of freedom frightens people and unleashes all manner of conservative defense mechanisms.

Our lives teach us who we are.

When thought becomes excessively painful, action is the finest remedy.

I do not need the idea of God to explain the world I live in.

Be sure that you go to the author to get at his meaning, not to find yours.

'The Satanic Verses' was denied the ordinary life of a novel. It became something smaller and uglier: an insult.

A mature society understands that at the heart of democracy is argument.

A novel, I think, is partly about the contemporary and partly about the eternal, and it's the balance of that that's difficult to achieve.

A poet's work is to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.

A purpose of our lives is to broaden what we can understand and say and therefore be.

A relationship with an imaginary woman is preferable to a relationship with a real one.

A thing that happens to migrants is that they lose many of the traditional things which root identity, which root the self.

Acting was always my unscratched itch, when I was in college and even afterwards.

Actually, I don't even like parties. I would much prefer a room with four friends who sit around and have dinner. I detest nightclubs. And I don't like places where the noise is so loud you can't talk to people.

Airport security exists to guard us against terrorist attacks.

All art began as sacred art, you know? I mean, all painting began as religious painting. All writing began as religious writing.

All my adult life, if I didn't have several hours a day to sit in a room by myself, I would get antsy and irritable.

American literature has always been immigrant.

An attack upon our ability to tell stories is not just censorship - it is a crime against our nature as human beings.

Anyone who has had the experience of going through American security checks knows the purpose of these checks is not to make you safer; it's just to annoy you.

Anyone who reads my work will see that there are often difficult relationships between fathers and sons.

As a writer, one of the things we all learned from the movies was a kind of compression that didn't exist before people were used to watching films. For instance, if you wanted to write a flashback in a novel, you once had to really contextualize it a lot, to set it up. Now, readers know exactly what you're doing. Close-ups, too.

At the height of the British Empire very few English novels were written that dealt with British power. It's extraordinary that at the moment in which England was the global superpower the subject of British power appeared not to interest most writers.