When you are making an independent film, money is never an issue.
Original thought, original artistic expression is by its very nature questioning, irreverent, iconoclastic.
The response of anybody interested in liberty is that we all have a say and the ability to have an argument is exactly what liberty is, even though it may never be resolved. In any authoritarian society the possessor of power dictates, and if you try and step outside he will come after you.
Sometimes when you finish a book, you don’t know quite what you’ve got.
I seem to have fallen for women with missing parents. Goodness knows what it signifies.
Nobody wants to read a 600 page book in which the author is fabulous throughout.
Before I came to England, my favorite authors were P. G. Wodehouse and Agatha Christie. I used to devour both.
Censorship is the thing that stops you doing what you want to do, and what writers want to talk about is what they do, not what stops them doing it.
One of the things I’ve learnt is not to depend on there being a woman in your life to make it work. I love my work, I love my children, I’ve got wonderful friends, you know, I have a nice life.
In the experience of art, time seems not to exist.
Rock n’ roll was a kid when I was a kid.
I don’t read my books, I write them. Once I’ve finished the many years it usually takes me to write them, I can’t bear to read them, because I’ve spent too long with them already. I’m not advertising them very well, am I?
In this world without quiet corners, there can be no easy escapes from history, from hullabaloo, from terrible, unquiet fuss.
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.
Free societies are societies in motion, and with motion comes friction.
I don’t like books that seem to want to teach me things. Which is not to say that one doesn’t learn from books – but you do your own learning in your own way.
The Christian Coalition is still about Christianity, even if it’s an idea of Christianity that many Christians might not go along with.
‘The Satanic Verses’ was denied the ordinary life of a novel. It became something smaller and uglier: an insult.
I don’t feel American. I do feel like a New Yorker. I think there’s a real distinction there. A city allows you to become a citizen even when you’re not a national.
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.
What I worry about and don’t like is the way in which the ideology of multiculturalism has declined into cultural relativism. I think that’s very dangerous. When the Archbishop of Canterbury, for God’s sake, says that you can’t have one law for everybody… that’s stupid.
Whenever I write something, I always want to make sure that what I write is defensible.
Sometimes writing a novel is not unlike having a baby. You’d have to ask a female novelist to compare the pain.
There is nothing intrinsic linking any religion with any act of violence. The crusades don’t prove that Christianity was violent. The Inquisition doesn’t prove that Christianity tortures people. But that Christianity did torture people.
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.
A poet’s work is to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.
The Republicans were not always insane. They might’ve had politics I didn’t agree with, but they weren’t always actually certifiable.
It’s Kennedy’s war, Vietnam. Lyndon Johnson got all the flak, but it’s Kennedy’s war.
I am not in the business of suppressing books.
It’s so disappointing, to put it mildly, that people know so much about my life. Because it means that they’re always trying to look at my books in terms of my life.
