Rushdie: Is Nothing Sacred?

I am in the process of reading Imaginary Homelands - a collection of essays and criticism written by Salman Rushdie during 1981-1991 and just finished Is Nothing Sacred? - Rushdie's Herbert Read Lecture delivered by Harold Pinter in 1990. It is a complex essay that flows across and touches upon quite a few things, but I wanted to share a couple of lines that struck me:

Literature is an interim report from the consciousness of the artist, and so it can never be "finished" or "perfect." Literature is made at the frontier between the self and the world, and in the act of creation that frontier softens, becomes permeable, allows the world to flow into the artist and the artist to flow into the world.

Literature is the one place in any society where, within the secrecy of our own heads, we can hear voices talking about everything in every possible way. The reason for ensuring that that privileged arena is preserved is not that writers want the absolute freedom to say and do whatever they please. It is that we, all of us, readers and writers and citizens and generals and godmen, need that little, unimportant- looking room. We do not need to call it sacred, but we do need to remember that it is necessary.

Note: The link provided to the essay was located using Google and leads to a page on the MIT site. I have used it because the link was searchable. If there is a copyright issue, send me a message and I shall fix the link. Thanks.