Five mysteries hold the keys to the unseen: the act of love, and the birth of a baby, and the contemplation of great art, and being in the presence of death or disaster, and hearing the human voice lifted in song.
We all owe death a life.
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 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.
There is no alternative to the peaceful coexistence of cultures.
Rock and roll music – the music of freedom frightens people and unleashes all manner of conservative defense mechanisms.
I don’t dictate to anyone what to believe and what not to. And I don’t want that to be dictated to me either.
Not all possibilities are open to us. The world is finite; our hopes spill over its rim.
Now I know what a ghost is. Unfinished business, that’s what.
Free-form games in which the player can make choices about what the game is going to be, become a kind of gaming equivalent of the narrative possibility.
It seems that the right of freedom of speech that was enshrined in numerous constitutions is now under attack by religious institutions.
Having been borne across the world, we are translated men. It is normally supposed that something always gets lost in translation; I cling, obstinately, to the notion that something can also be gained.
The lessons one learns at school are not always the ones the school thinks it’s teaching.
Where there is no belief, there is no blasphemy.
He knew what he knew: that the real world was full of magic, so magical worlds could easily be real.
I have never really thought of myself as a writer about religion. And I think one of the things that happened to me as a result of all that is that I think it did for some people, many people, obscure the kind of writer that I actually am.
I get a lot of letters – a lot of letters saying, who knew that you were funny?
If I were dead, then nobody in England would have to fuss about the cost of my security and whether or not I merited such special treatment for so long.
If the culture shifts, if people think differently about women, the art will shift, too. You can’t ask art to make social change. It’s not what it’s for.
If I had simply wanted to trade on an insult to Islam, I could have done it in a sentence rather than writing a 250,000-word novel, a work of fiction.