What can art really do in the face of atrocity?

Even for the most excitable preacher, there was nothing inherently sinful about a waffle.

Great art has dreadful manners. The greatest paintings grab you in a headlock, rough up your composure, and then proceed in short order to re-arrange your reality.

Charlie Hebdo: Satire was the father of true political freedom, born in the 18th century; the scourge of bigots and tyrants. Sing its praises.

Histories never conclude; they just pause their prose. Their stories are, if they are truthful, untidy affairs, resistant to windings-up and sortings-out. They beat raggedly on into the future.

Irreverence is the lifeblood of freedom.

The irony about Charles II is not that he came to the throne because England needed a successor to Charles I, but because England needed a successor to Oliver Cromwell.

There are some places where history just grabs you by the jugular. This is one of them.

Nations don't start out. There is not a particular moment when they unveil the essence of themselves. They are always a work in progress.

But it struck me that the extreme violence and cruelty of the English Civil War had gone understated.

I actually think that history has fed off the restlessness of cyber space, of kind of the frantic, segmented nature of the way we lead our lives. People want to be connected.

In patience endurance, we know the faith of being.

I too realize that the less I preach the more likely I am to be heard.

If I had to choose my driving force, it would be passion.

We can be more or less conscious when you create grades of focus on a subject that is flowing in our stream of consciousness.

This country is about, in my judgment, aggressive, open debate. There is an old saying: When everyone is thinking the same thing, no one is thinking very much.

So I regard my part in Genevieve as a real challenge

I think Spider-Man [film], the first one particularly, really figured out the formula of, "Oh, tell the story that they told in the comic. It was compelling. That's why it's iconic."

All of God's creatures have names, every last one of them. Of that I am sure: of that I have no doubt at all.

Skating was the vessel into which I could pour my heart and soul

I'm interested in the innovator and the early adopter.