Vertigo is the conflict between the fear of falling and the desire to fall.

One of the extraordinary things about human events is that the unthinkable becomes thinkable.

Names, once they are in common use, quickly become mere sounds, their etymology being buried, like so many of the earth’s marvels, beneath the dust of habit.

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.

It is very, very easy not to be offended by a book. You just have to shut it.

Rock and roll music – the music of freedom frightens people and unleashes all manner of conservative defense mechanisms.

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.

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

What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry.

Most of what matters in your life takes place in your absence.

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.

When thought becomes excessively painful, action is the finest remedy.

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.

Doubt, it seems to me, is the central condition of a human being in the twentieth century.

Our lives teach us who we are.

If Woody Allen were a Muslim, he’d be dead by now.

Vertigo is the conflict between the fear of falling and the desire to fall.

I hate admitting that my enemies have a point.

Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory.

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.

I do not need the idea of God to explain the world I live in.

What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.

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.

In this world without quiet corners, there can be no easy escapes from history, from hullabaloo, from terrible, unquiet fuss.

Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.

Be sure that you go to the author to get at his meaning, not to find yours.

If I were asked for a one-sentence sound bite on religion, I would say I was against it.

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.

Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.

Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts.