“Religion, a mediaeval form of unreason, when combined with modern weaponry becomes a real threat to our freedoms. This religious totalitarianism has caused a deadly mutation in the heart of Islam and we see the tragic consequences in Paris today.”

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.

So India’s problem turns out to be the world’s problem. What happened in India has happened in God’s name. The problem’s name is God.

How do you defeat terrorism? Don’t be terrorized.

When a reader falls in love with a book, it leaves its essence inside him, like radioactive fallout in an arable field, and after that there are certain crops that will no longer grow in him, while other, stranger, more fantastic growths may occasionally be produced.

It matters, it always matters, to name rubbish as rubbish; that to do otherwise is to legitimize it.

Friendships are the family we make – not the one we inherit. I’ve always been someone to whom friendship, elective affinities, is as important as family.

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

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.

We cannot allow religious hooligans to place limiting points on thought.

What’s real and what’s true aren’t necessarily the same.

For every snake, there is a ladder; for every ladder, a snake.

Our lives, our stories, flowed into one another’s, were no longer our own, individual, discrete.

One of the strange things about violent and authoritarian regimes is they don’t like the glare of negative publicity.

No, I don’t think it’s fair to label Islam ‘violent.’ But I will say that to my knowledge, no writer has ever gone into hiding for criticizing the Amish.

The only people who see the whole picture,’ he murmured, ‘are the ones who step out of the frame.

One of the things a writer is for is to say the unsayable, speak the unspeakable and ask difficult questions.

There is nothing so despicable as a secret society that is based upon religious prejudice and that will attempt to defeat a man because of his religious beliefs. Such a society is like a cockroach – it thrives in the dark. So do those who combine for such an end.

What interests us in operations of striation and smoothing are precisely the passages or combinations: how the forces at work within space continually striate it, and how in the course of its striation it develops other forces and emits new smooth spaces.

Real estate is the best investment for small savings. More money is made from the rise in real estate values than from all other causes combined.

The combination of old and new is what every wrestling organization should be like. That way, you have a chance to match up the legends in dream main events.

I don’t understand why it has to be either – or – either socialism or democracy. Why can’t we combine things to get the best of each system?

The way I understand it, the Russians are sort of a combination of evil and incompetence… sort of like the Post Office with tanks.

It was a strange combination to absorb – the everyday concerns of the town doctor stuck in the middle of a discussion of his early days in seventeenth-century London.

I love eye makeup. I really like doing a cat eye, playing with liquid liners and different colors of liners, like emerald and deep blues, combining them with black.