When I'm writing a book, sentence by sentence, I'm not thinking theoretically. I'm just trying to work out the story from inside the characters I've got.

I have never really thought of myself as a writer about religion. And I think one of the things that happened to me as a result of all that is that I think it did for some people, many people, obscure the kind of writer that I actually am.

Very often in free speech cases you find yourself defending material that you personally detest, because of course it's no trick to defend the free speech of people you either agree with or who don't particularly upset you. It's when people really upset you that you discover if you believe in free speech or not.

Our lives teach us who we are.

The First Amendment defends all forms of speech including hate speech, which is why groups like Ku Klux Klan are allowed to utter their poisonous remarks.

Not all possibilities are open to us. The world is finite; our hopes spill over its rim.

The Republicans were not always insane. They might've had politics I didn't agree with, but they weren't always actually certifiable.