“Religion is responsible for a lot of the problems in the history of the world and it’s not something that I practice or recommend, but to each his own.”

If you actually want to change your world, there is a better way of doing it than blowing yourself up.

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.

In the tumult of great events, solitude was what I hoped for. Now it is what I love. How is it possible to be contented with anything else when one has come face to face with history?

That’s the history of the world. His story is told, hers isn’t.

By the way, Wonder Woman is Amazonian, and historically accurate Amazonian women actually had only one breast. So, if I’d really go ‘by the book’ it’d be problematic.

It’s horrifying and absurd to think that there are currently more slaves on earth than at any other time in human history.

History consists, for the greater part, of the miseries brought upon the world by pride, ambition, avarice, revenge, lust, sedition, hypocrisy, ungoverned zeal, and all the train of disorderly appetite.

Your personal history is a part of what happens with your hands and your head as you play music.

Don’t be a marshmallow. Walk the street with us into history. Get off the sidewalk. Stop being vegetables. Work for Justice. Viva the boycott!

Walk the street with us into history. Get off the sidewalk.