I admit it: above all things, I fear absurdity.

Why obliterate the exceptional merely in order to make the outstanding look finer than it was?

An attack upon our ability to tell stories is not just censorship - it is a crime against our nature as human beings.

What one writer can make in the solitude of one room is something no power can easily destroy.

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.

We all dream things into being; you imagine yourself having a child, and then you have a child. An inventor will think of something in his mind and then make it actual. So things are often passing from the imagined realm into the real world.

One either loves, or waits for love, or banishes love for good. That is the full range of possible choices.