One of the strange things about violent and authoritarian regimes is they don't like the glare of negative publicity. If you can make them sufficiently uncomfortable, they frequently respond by doing what you need them to do in the spirit of setting people free or ceasing arrests, which has worked time and time again with PEN.

Our lives teach us who we are.

Two things form the bedrock of any open society - freedom of expression and rule of law. If you don't have those things, you don't have a free country.

It is very, very easy not to be offended by a book. You just have to shut it.

It's true that the human body is more vulnerable than the products of the human mind. We need to protect artists and journalists people to allow them to work.

People can do bad things with free speech as well as good. You have to defend the Ku Klux Klan as well as Martin Luther King. It's like that. If you're going to defend the principle, then you have to defend people who use the principle badly.

I think it's a very important function of art to challenge accepted reality, especially when that reality is created by powerful interest groups.