The loss of Christopher Hitchens leaves the world a far poorer place, but perhaps Salman Rushdie's tribute to him – "A great voice falls silent. A great heart stops" – is only half right. Of course we can only imagine what he would have gone on to say if he had been spared another day, another week or another year, but a voice like that of Hitchens never really falls silent.

Readers around the world will be turning to their shelves today to consult his elegant memoir, Hitch-22, his anti-religious polemic, God Is Not Great, and his campaigner's manual, Letters to a Young Contrarian, but in the age of the internet, a writer as prolific as Hitchens leaves pearls everywhere.

Of course he's in the Guardian, reflecting on the treatment of journalism in fiction, defending his friend Martin Amis, hymning Brideshead Revisited and examining the decade since 9/11.

But here he is in Vanity Fair, too, with his "first raw reactions to being stricken" with cancer of the oesophagus, his analysis of Everybody Pray for Hitchens Day, and his final meditation on the myth of Friedrich Nietzsche's maxim "Whatever doesn't kill me makes me stronger." Here he is, too, reviewing Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall in the Atlantic and reacting to Tony Blair's faith foundation in the New Statesman.

Never camera-shy, he also leaves his legacy on celluloid too. Highlights include his Freedom Festival lecture on "the Jesus myth", his interview with Anderson Cooper on god and cancer on CNN, and various highlights packages of his finest, pithiest, most caustic moments.

On the day when Hitchens finally met "our common fate", his dismissal of "facile maxims that don't live up to their apparent billing" rings out as loud as ever.