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

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

A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

I hate admitting that my enemies have a point.