“Masks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull.”

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You can’t have modern states based on ideas which have been out of date for a thousand years.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

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.

What kind of Christmas present would Jesus ask Santa for?

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.

Some of us gave a little blood for the right to participate in the democratic process.

You have to go the way your blood beats. If you don’t live the only life you have, you won’t live some other life, you won’t live any life at all.

All beauty comes from beautiful blood and a beautiful brain.

The soul, which is spirit, can not dwell in dust; it is carried along to dwell in the blood.

Freedom has cost too much blood and agony to be relinquished at the cheap price of rhetoric.

The devil’s agents may be of flesh and blood, may they not?

Use your blood to paint. Keep painting until you faint. Keep painting until you die.

I have a violence in me that is hot as death-blood.