We were language’s magpies by nature, stealing whatever sounded bright and shiny.
Human beings understand themselves and shape their futures by arguing and challenging and questioning and saying the un-sayable, not by bowing the knee whether to gods or to men.
I grew up in a family in which there was very little religion. My father wasn’t religious at all. But he was really interested in the subject of, you know, the birth and growth of Islam. And he basically transmitted that interest to me.
Our lives teach us who we are.
An attack upon our ability to tell stories is not just censorship – it is a crime against our nature as human beings.
Reality is a question of perspective.
How do you defeat terrorism? Don’t be terrorized.
Between the adored and the adorer falls the shadow.
The moment you declare a set of ideas to be immune from criticism, satire, derision, or contempt, freedom of thought becomes impossible.
I have always thought that these two ways of talking, one is the fantastic, the fable, the fairy tale, and the other being history, the scholarly study of what happened, I think they’re both amazing ways to understand human nature.
YouTube is full of pieces of trash. If you want to look on YouTube and find something that insults you, you can probably find it.
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.
One of the problems with defending free speech is you often have to defend people that you find to be outrageous and unpleasant and disgusting.
I always thought the front line was the bookstores. And bookstores around America, around the world did astonishingly well. They held the line. They didn’t chicken out. You know, they defended the book. They kept it in the front of the store.
What one writer can make in the solitude of one room is something no power can easily destroy.
Stories in families are colossally important. Every family has stories: some funny, some proud, some embarrassing, some shameful. Knowing them is proof of belonging to the family.
In this world without quiet corners, there can be no easy escapes from history, from hullabaloo, from terrible, unquiet fuss.
But I – and I just think it’s very – one of the problems of defending the extraordinary principle of freedom of speech is that you have to defend freedom of speech for people like that too.
A book is not completed till it’s read.
Go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets. Take a deep breath before you begin...