 Be sure that you go to the author to get at his meaning, not to find yours. |
| Most of what matters in your life takes place in your absence. |
| If Woody Allen were a Muslim, he'd be dead by now. |
| It is very, very easy not to be offended by a book. You just have to shut it. |
| Our lives are not what we deserve; they are, let us agree, in many ways deficient. |
| A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return. |
| What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist. |
| Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts. |
| Rock and roll music - the music of freedom frightens people and unleashes all manner of conservative defense mechanisms. |
| What one writer can make in the solitude of one room is something no power can easily destroy. |
| I do not need the idea of God to explain the world I live in. |
| 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. |
| One of the extraordinary things about human events is that the unthinkable becomes thinkable. |
| Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one. |
| Such is the miraculous nature of the future of exiles: what is first uttered in the impotence of an overheated apartment becomes the fate of nations. |
| I used to say, 'There is a God-shaped hole in me.' For a long time I stressed the absence, the hole. Now I find it is the shape which has become more important. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory. |
| What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry. |
