It is often said by religious people that without its framework, there is no sense of right or wrong. My view is that religion comes after ethics.

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

There are plenty of bad editors who try to impose their own vision on a book. (…)A good novel editor is invisible.

I've always believed that you can think positive just as well as you can think negative.

Creating new paths requires moving old obstacles.

No man is an island, but some of us are long peninsulas.

Sometimes I’ve even wished there was a human pause button, where you could choose some point in your life where you could stay always.

I'm born and raised in the Northeast. My parents are Irish immigrants. So our tendency is to shy away from the big yellow ball that comes up in the sky every once in a while.

Peace on earth and mercy mild are still possible. On Christmas Eve, all things are possible.

My aim in helping the patient was not to cause death. My aim was to end suffering. It's got to be decriminalized.

[When to have a facelift:] If you're tripping over your neck.

You can't really imagine every moment of a movie in the same way that you wouldn't expect a novelist to envision every sentence of his 800-page novel.