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

If you take a look at history, you will find that the understanding of what is good and evil has always existed before the individual religions. The religions were only invented by people afterwards, in order to express this idea.

Science fiction is always a vehicle for ideas. It’s the form which allows either movies or books to be an exploration of how we should live.

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

Too many people spouting too many words, and in the end those words will turn to bullets and stones.

Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, power to retell it, to rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change, truly are powerless, because they cannot think new thoughts.

If you actually want to change your world, there is a better way of doing it than blowing yourself up.

I have always thought that these two ways of talking, one is the fantastic, the fable, the fairy tale, and the other being history, the scholarly study of what happened, I think they’re both amazing ways to understand human nature.

So India’s problem turns out to be the world’s problem. What happened in India has happened in God’s name. The problem’s name is God.

How do you defeat terrorism? Don’t be terrorized.

When a reader falls in love with a book, it leaves its essence inside him, like radioactive fallout in an arable field, and after that there are certain crops that will no longer grow in him, while other, stranger, more fantastic growths may occasionally be produced.

It matters, it always matters, to name rubbish as rubbish; that to do otherwise is to legitimize it.

Friendships are the family we make – not the one we inherit. I’ve always been someone to whom friendship, elective affinities, is as important as family.

Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.

Literature is the one place in any society where, within the secrecy of our own heads, we can hear voices talking about everything in every possible way.

We cannot allow religious hooligans to place limiting points on thought.

What’s real and what’s true aren’t necessarily the same.

Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination.

The greatness of a man is not in how much wealth he acquires, but in his integrity and his ability to affect those around him positively.

Ability will never catch up with the demand for it.

Not everyone has equal abilities, but everyone should have equal opportunity for education.

God, our Creator, has stored within our minds and personalities, great potential strength and ability. Prayer helps us to tap and develop these powers.

What makes you a man is not the ability to make a child, it’s the courage to raise one.

Leadership is about empathy. It is about having the ability to relate to and connect with people for the purpose of inspiring and empowering their lives.

The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.