“From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable.”

If you’re offended, it’s your problem.

If somebody’s trying to shut you up, sing louder, and if possible, better.

Self-censorship is a lie to yourself; if you are going to be trying to seriously create art, to create literary art, and you decide to hold back, to censor yourself, then you are a fool to yourself and it would be better that you kept your mouth shut and did not speak.

We are the storytelling animal.

Stories in families are colossally important. Every family has stories: some funny, some proud, some embarrassing, some shameful. Knowing them is proof of belonging to the family.

Until you know who you are you can’t write.

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You can’t have modern states based on ideas which have been out of date for a thousand years.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

Peace begins with a smile.

Take care with the end as you do with the beginning.

The moment we begin to seek love, love begins to seek us. And to save us.

Thanks to my fans that have been with me from the beginning, I was able to sell out arenas on my own.

Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

It all began with a shoe on the wall. A shoe on the wall shouldn’t be there at all.

To feel absolutely right is the beginning of the end.

Crystals are living beings at the beginning of creation.