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

My horizon’s have shrunk and I have only endings to write.

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.

Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true.

I didn’t become a writer to write about me.

An attack upon our ability to tell stories is not just censorship – it is a crime against our nature as human beings.

The lessons one learns at school are not always the ones the school thinks it’s teaching.

I write books I’d enjoy reading, I’m the reader standing behind my shoulder.

Respect for religion’ has become a code phrase meaning ‘fear of religion.’ Religions, like all other ideas, deserve criticism, satire, and, yes, our fearless disrespect.

Liberate yourself, because no one else is going to liberate you.

I have never really thought of myself as a writer about religion. And I think one of the things that happened to me as a result of all that is that I think it did for some people, many people, obscure the kind of writer that I actually am.

Every time you finish a book, you have a terrible feeling that there’s just never going to be another one. But fortunately, so far, the next one has always shown up.

Between the adored and the adorer falls the shadow.

I’ve been worrying about God a little bit lately. It seems like he’s been in a bad mood. And I think it has to do with the quality of lovers he’s been getting.

In the cookie of life, friends are the chocolate chips.

From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable.

Faith without doubt is addiction.

It is the main motivation of mankind to be free, to express our true selves and pursue our dreams without restriction–to experience what may be called Personal Freedom.

Loving someone is setting them free, letting them go.

If you don’t set your spirit free now then when will you find your wild.

If we care about universal principles such as freedom, democracy and the rule of law, we cannot leave them to the care of market forces; we must establish some other institutions to safeguard them.

[The Freedom of Information Act is] the Taj Mahal of the Doctrine of Unanticipated Consequences, the Sistine Chapel of Cost-Benefit Analysis Ignored.

Modern dance isn’t anything except one thing in my mind: the freedom of women in America.

Everything has a beginning and an ending. Make peace with that and all will be well…In life we cannot avoid change, we cannot avoid loss. Freedom and happiness are found in the flexibility and ease with which we move through change.

As we free ourselves from the suffering of ‘something is wrong with me, ‘we trust and express the fullness of who we are.’