"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."
"What one writer can make in the solitude of one room is something no power can easily destroy."
"What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry."
"It is very, very easy not to be offended by a book. You just have to shut it."
"Our lives teach us who we are."
"I hate admitting that my enemies have a point."
"A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return."
"Most of what matters in your life takes place in your absence."
"Be sure that you go to the author to get at his meaning, not to find yours."
"Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself."
"If Woody Allen were a Muslim, he'd be dead by now."
"I do not need the idea of God to explain the world I live in."
"When thought becomes excessively painful, action is the finest remedy."
"Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts."
"Vertigo is the conflict between the fear of falling and the desire to fall."
"What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist."
"Our lives are not what we deserve; they are, let us agree, in many ways deficient."
"If I were asked for a one-sentence sound bite on religion, I would say I was against it."
"One of the extraordinary things about human events is that the unthinkable becomes thinkable."
"In this world without quiet corners, there can be no easy escapes from history, from hullabaloo, from terrible, unquiet fuss."
"Rock and roll music - the music of freedom frightens people and unleashes all manner of conservative defense mechanisms."
"Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory."
"Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one."
"Doubt, it seems to me, is the central condition of a human being in the twentieth century."
"Names, once they are in common use, quickly become mere sounds, their etymology being buried, like so many of the earth's marvels, beneath the dust of habit."
