People can do bad things with free speech as well as good. You have to defend the Ku Klux Klan as well as Martin Luther King. It's like that. If you're going to defend the principle, then you have to defend people who use the principle badly.

The time-honored role of the artist [is] to speak truth to power.

You never know the answers to the questions of life until you are asked.

When you are writing a book, it feels as if you are simply concentrating on the world of the book and that whatever is happening in your personal life is outside the room, as it were. But maybe that's just the way you have to talk to yourself to make it possible.

The only people who see the whole picture,' he murmured, 'are the ones who step out of the frame.

I have been a film buff all my life and believe that the finest cinema is fully the equal of the best novels.

So when I studied history at Cambridge, I did a special subject in that, exactly that. And then actually that - while I was studying it was where I came across the so-called incident of the satanic verses.