“What kind of Christmas present would Jesus ask Santa for?”

I stand with Charlie Hebdo, as we all must, to defend the art of satire.

You can’t have modern states based on ideas which have been out of date for a thousand years.

Something was badly amiss with the spiritual life of the planet, Too many demons inside people claiming to believe in God.

I think if we wish to live in any kind of a moral universe, we must hold the perpetrators of violence responsible for the violence they perpetrate. It’s very simple. The criminal is responsible for the crime.

What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.

The world, somebody wrote, is the place we prove real by dying in it.

Of course, there is nothing intrinsic linking any religion with any act of violence. The crusades don’t prove that Christianity was violent. The Inquisition doesn’t prove that Christianity tortures people. But that Christianity did torture people.

We have come to think of taking offence as a fundamental right. We value very little more highly than our rage, which gives us, in our opinion, the moral high ground. From there we can shoot down at our enemies and inflict heavy fatalities.

In the waking dreams our societies permit, in our myths, our arts, our songs, we celebrate the nonbelongers, the different ones, the outlaws, the freaks.

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.

Masks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull.

Among the great struggles of man-good/evil, reason/unreason, etc.-there is also this mighty conflict between the fantasy of Home and the fantasy of Away, the dream of roots and the mirage of the journey.

Perhaps the story you finish is never the one you begin.

Where there is no belief, there is no blasphemy.

Two things form the bedrock of any open society – freedom of expression and rule of law. If you don’t have those things, you don’t have a free country.

We were language’s magpies by nature, stealing whatever sounded bright and shiny.

My kids are no different than anyone else’s – they tend to disagree with everything I say!

Tell a man that there are 400 billion stars and he’ll believe you. Tell him a bench has wet paint and he has to touch it.

And God said, ‘Let there be light’ and there was light, but the Electricity Board said He would have to wait until Thursday to be connected.

Why is a person who plays the piano called a pianist but a person who drives a racing car not called a racist?

Why, in a country of free speech, are there phone bills?

First the doctor told me the good news: I was going to have a disease named after me.

Australia, Australia, we love you from the heart. The kidneys, the liver & the giblets too. And every other part.

I have an inferiority complex, but it’s not a very good one.