When you know what you're against you have taken the first step to discovering what you're for.

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

Where I am today has everything to do with the years I spent hanging on to a career by my fingernails.

Your temperature's normal, though I'd say it's the only thing about you that is.

Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.

I was not elected to serve one party.

There is a tone of morality throughout the rural districts of England, which is unhappily wanting in the large towns and the centres of particular manufactures

You can maybe be artistic and really original and creative, but as long as it's got that funniness at the root of it, then certain people are going to love it just because they need a laugh.

It all begins and ends in the same place, doesn't it? Conor and me in Ballyutogue. We all come home eventually.

I'm the last of the mad ones.

The world’s champ should be pretty like me!

I've done a lot of crafts in my day. I learned how to do pottery, yoga... and I just wanted to share and talk and write.