1. "A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return."
2. “America finds itself facing an ideological enemy that may turn out harder to defeat that Islam: that is to say, anti-Americanism, which is presently taking the world by storm.”
3. ”A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.”
4. “Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.”
5. ”Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.”
6. “I don't think it is always necessary to take up the anti-colonial - or is it post-colonial? - cudgels against English. What seems to me to be happening is that those people who were once colonized by the language are now rapidly remaking it, domesticating it, becoming more and more relaxed about the way they use it-assisted by the English language's enormous flexibility and size, they are carving out large territories for themselves within its frontiers.”
7. ”If you want to tell the untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you've got to find a language. Which goes for film as well as prose, for documentary as well as autobiography. Use the wrong language, and you're dumb and blind.”
8. “I once spent a day at the immigration barriers at London's Heathrow Airport, watching the treatment of arriving passengers by immigration personnel. It did not amaze me to discover that most of the passengers who had some trouble getting past the control point were not white but black or Arab-looking. What was surprising is that there was one factor that overrode blackness or Arab looks. That factor was the possession of an American passport. Produce an American passport, and immigration officers at once become color blind, and wave you quickly on your way, however suspiciously non-Caucasian your features. To those to whom the world is closed, such openness is greatly to be desired. Those who assume that openness to be theirs by right perhaps value it less. When you have enough air to breathe, you don't yearn for air. But when breathable air gets to be in short supply, you quickly start noticing how important it is. (Freedom's like that, too.)”
9. ”It's very, very easy not to be offended by a book. You just have to shut it. To say that the book which you have not opened, which you have not read, which you do not possess, offends you seems to me to be not just a peculiar position but a reprehensible position.”
10. "Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination and of the heart."
11. “No, little rich boy, there is no third principle; there is only money-and-poverty, and have and lack, and right-and-left; there is only me-against the world! The world is not ideas, rich boy; the world is no place for dreamers or their dreams; the world, little Snotnose, is things. Things and their makers rule the world. For things, the country is run. Not for people. When you have things, there is time to dream; when you don't, you fight.”
12. "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."
13. "One of the extraordinary things about human events is that the unthinkable becomes thinkable."
14. "Our lives teach us who we are."
15. ”Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems -- but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems incredible.”
16. "Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts."
17. "The acceptance that all that is solid has melted into the air, that reality and morality are not givens but imperfect human constructs, is the point from which fiction begins."
18. “The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas - uncertainty, progress, change - into crimes.”
19. "The liveliness of literature lies in its exceptionality, in being the individual, idiosyncratic vision of one human being, in which, to our delight and great surprise, we may find our own vision reflected."
20. “The most important part of the title is the comma. Because it seems to me that I am that comma.”
21. “The real risks for any artist are taken...in pushing the work to the limits of what is possible, in the attempt to increase the sum of what it is possible to think. Books become good when they go to this edge and risk falling over it--when they endanger the artist by reason of what he has, or has not, artistically dared.”
22. "Throughout human history, the apostles of purity, those who have claimed to possess a total explanation, have wrought havoc among mere mixed-up human beings."
23. “What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.”
24. “When thought becomes excessively painful, action is the finest remedy.”
25. "Where there is no belief, there is no blasphemy."
26. "Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory."
