“Once you put a thought into the world, it can be disagreed with, but it can’t be unthought.”

Reality is a question of perspective.

What one writer can make in the solitude of one room is something no power can easily destroy.

If you take a look at history, you will find that the understanding of what is good and evil has always existed before the individual religions. The religions were only invented by people afterwards, in order to express this idea.

Science fiction is always a vehicle for ideas. It’s the form which allows either movies or books to be an exploration of how we should live.

Free speech is not just free speech for people you admire. It’s also for people who you think of as reprehensible.

Too many people spouting too many words, and in the end those words will turn to bullets and stones.

Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, power to retell it, to rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change, truly are powerless, because they cannot think new thoughts.

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.

Peace is the result of retraining your mind to process life as it is, rather than as you think it should be.

The biggest killers of children around the world are two things: diarrhea and pneumonia. When you think about it, in the United States, kids don’t die of diarrhea anymore, but it’s a huge problem in the developing world.

I think I just care about people, and I have a mission to support them to succeed.

When you start falling for somebody and you can’t stop thinking about when you’re going to see them again, I love that. Women are beautiful. They deserve to be cherished and respected.

I hate the idea of always having to interpret other people’s ideas and thoughts and words, because I’m very independent and, I guess, a free thinker.

Short, sweet, and to the point. Clear writing, and therefore clear commands, comes from clear thinking. Think simple.

I think the Americans need to understand that a lot of times the children are bored in school, and that is why they are not staying in.

There is nothing you can see that is not a flower; there is nothing you can think that is not the moon.