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

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.

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.

Reality is a question of perspective.

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

Better to die fighting for freedom then be a prisoner all the days of your life.

I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.

I am an American; free born and free bred, where I acknowledge no man as my superior, except for his own worth, or as my inferior, except for his own demerit.

So long as freedom from hunger is only half achieved, so long as two thirds of the nations have food deficits, no citizen, no nation can afford to be satisfied.

Through discipline comes freedom.

My main fight is for freedom and equality.

If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.

Those who expect to be both ignorant and free, expect what never was and never will be.