To see things plainly, you have to cross a frontier.

When you write, you write out of your best self. Everything else drops away.

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.

If you actually want to change your world, there is a better way of doing it than blowing yourself up.

One of the characteristics of mudslinging is that mud sticks if it's thrown with enough force for long enough.

I can walk into a bookshop and point out a number of books that I find very unattractive in what they say. But it doesn't occur to me to burn the bookshop down. If you don't like a book, read another book. If you start reading a book and you decide you don't like it, nobody is telling you to finish it.

If I had simply wanted to trade on an insult to Islam, I could have done it in a sentence rather than writing a 250,000-word novel, a work of fiction.