It's true that the human body is more vulnerable than the products of the human mind.

Very often in free speech cases you find yourself defending material that you personally detest, because of course it's no trick to defend the free speech of people you either agree with or who don't particularly upset you. It's when people really upset you that you discover if you believe in free speech or not.

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

Shame is like everything else; live with it for long enough and it becomes part of the furniture.

The writers of the French enlightenment had deliberately used blasphemy as a weapon, refusing to accept the power of the Church to set limiting points on thought.

I want to write novels. I want to write stories. I want to do the stuff that I became a writer to do.

There are things you break that can't be put back together again. And Kashmir may be one of them.