One of the things a writer is for is to say the unsayable, speak the unspeakable and ask difficult questions.

I've always prided myself on my discipline as a writer. I do it like a job. I get up in the morning and go to my desk.

Names, once they are in common use, quickly become mere sounds, their etymology being buried, like so many of the earth's marvels, beneath the dust of habit.

There's no point going to a country which is torturing people to ask them to stop if they can point out that the United States is doing it too. It enormously weakens the argument. Back in the early days of the Bush administration, PEN made a decision that we would try and make human rights issues and civil rights issues in this country part of the priority, and not just international issues, which had more or less been the priority up until then.

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.

You can't judge an internal injury by the size of the hole.

The suicide bomber's imagination leads him to believe in a brilliant act of heroism, when in fact he is simply blowing himself up pointlessly and taking other people's lives.