One of the problems with defending free speech is you often have to defend people that you find to be outrageous and unpleasant and disgusting.

Chekhov is this poet of melancholy and isolation and of wishing you were somewhere else than where you are.

It matters, it always matters, to name rubbish as rubbish; that to do otherwise is to legitimize it.

Free speech is not just free speech for people you admire. It's also for people who you think of as reprehensible.

I don't think there really is much of a left in America, certainly by European standards even the left is quite right wing here.

The real risks for any artist are taken in pushing the work to the limits of what is possible, in the attempt to increase the sum of what it is possible to think. Books become good when they go to this edge and risk falling over it -when they endanger the artist by reason of what he has, or has not, artistically dared.

Religion, a mediaeval form of unreason, when combined with modern weaponry becomes a real threat to our freedoms.