In a novel, if you're any good, you don't just have good people or bad people. You have complicated people. You have real people.

There are things you break that can't be put back together again. And Kashmir may be one of them.

Rock and roll music - the music of freedom frightens people and unleashes all manner of conservative defense mechanisms.

What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.

One of the extraordinary things about human events is that the unthinkable becomes thinkable.

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

‘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.

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

Language upon a silvered tongue affords enchantment enough.

The whole story of migration and what that has done in interconnecting the planet is obviously something I've written about a lot.

faith without doubt is addiction

Love, not because of beauty, because of who they are.

Experience has two things to teach: The first is that we must correct a great deal the second that we must not correct too much.

The world of painting has nothing to do with the art world.

This anonymous clan of slack-jawed troglodytes has cost me the election, and yet if I were to have them killed, I would be the one to go to jail. That's democracy for you.

I fully realize that the new organization is a human rather than a perfect instrumentality for the attainment of its great objective. As time goes on it will, I am sure, be improved.

Even the klan revamped their image by losing the hoods and changing their name to the Tea Party.

Desperation is the secret to my steady employment. I am not interested in downtime. I really like to keep working all the time and I always feel like I'm in the mail room of life; working up.

Happiness is the natural state of our being

Everything in life is built on principles - plants, seas, birds, all of the natural elements of nature, they all follow and obey certain basic fundamental principles.

The outer space beings are my brothers. They sent me here. They already know my music.