Many writers who have had to deal with the subject of atrocity can't face it head-on.

human beings do not perceive things whole; we are not gods but wounded creatures, cracked lenses, capable only of fractured perceptions

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.

Masks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull.

The writers of the French enlightenment had deliberately used blasphemy as a weapon, refusing to accept the power of the Church to set limiting points on thought.