The publishing of a book is a worldwide event. The attempt to suppress a book is a worldwide event.
Literature is the one place in any society where, within the secrecy of our own heads, we can hear voices talking about everything in every possible way.
My heart broke open and history fell in.
Perhaps the story you finish is never the one you begin.
Freedom to reject is the only freedom.
If the creative artist worries if he will still be free tomorrow, then he will not be free today.
Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination and of the heart.
Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, power to retell it, to rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change, truly are powerless, because they cannot think new thoughts.
There is nothing intrinsic linking any religion with any act of violence. The crusades don’t prove that Christianity was violent. The Inquisition doesn’t prove that Christianity tortures people. But that Christianity did torture people.
Good advice is rarer than rubies.
Fundamentalism isn’t about religion, it’s about power.
When you throw everything up in the air anything becomes possible.
Our lives, our stories, flowed into one another’s, were no longer our own, individual, discrete.
What’s the use of stories that aren’t even true?
So when I studied history at Cambridge, I did a special subject in that, exactly that. And then actually that – while I was studying it was where I came across the so-called incident of the satanic verses.
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.
Exile is a dream of a glorious return. Exile is a vision of revolution: Elba, not St Helena. It is an endless paradox: looking forward by always looking back. The exile is a ball hurled high into the air.
We crave permission openly to become our secret selves.
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.
You can’t judge an internal injury by the size of the hole.