We care about moral issues, nobility, decency, happiness, goodness—the issues that matter in the real world, but which can only be addressed, in their purity, in fiction.

There was no name for the disease; his body had gone insane, forgotten the blueprint by which human beings were built. Even now the disease still lives on in his children. Not in our bodies, but in our souls. We exist where normal human children are expected to be; we're even shaped the same. But each of us in our own way has been replaced by an imitation child, shaped out of a twisted, fetid, lipidous goiter that grew out of Father's soul.

Satanic Verses is a despicable book that could not have been written by a person who wished to behave decently and responsibly.

She likes us,” said Umbo. “I know, I could feel it too,” said Rigg. “She’s really glad to have us here. I think she loves us like her own children.” “Whom she murdered and cut up into the stew.” “They were delicious.

Human: That's stupid. Isn't there grass on both sides?

Someday stars will wind down or blow up. Someday death will cover us all like the water of a lake and perhaps nothing will ever come to the surface to show that we were ever there. But we WERE there, and during the time we lived, we were alive. That's the truth - what is, what was, what will be - not what could be, what should have been, what never can be.

It's the teachers, they're the enemy. They get us to fight each other, to hate each other.