When I was writing The Satanic Verses, if you had asked me about the phenomenon that we all now know as radical Islam, I wouldn't have had much to say. As recently as the mid-1980s, it didn't seem to be a big deal.

The rate of change is global now. I think there's a kind of mind that is so ill at ease with that transformation that it reaches out for something permanent. And religious faith offers that, from simplicities, which you are told are eternal and unchanging, and you can hold on to those like a life raft in a metamorphosing world.

Not even the visionary or mystical experience ever lasts very long. It is for art to capture that experience, to offer it to, in the case of literature, its readers; to be, for a secular, materialist culture, some sort of replacement for what the love of god offers in the world of faith.

We crave permission openly to become our secret selves.

In a novel, if you're any good, you don't just have good people or bad people. You have complicated people. You have real people.

She's no flibberti-gibberti mamzell, but a whir-stir-get-lost-sir bundla dynamite!

There needs to be a thorough examination, by Muslims everywhere, of why it is that the faith they love breeds so many violent mutant strains.