A sigh isn't just a sigh. We inhale the world and breathe out meaning. While we can. While we can.

American literature has always been immigrant.

What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.

You can't judge an internal injury by the size of the hole.

The history of a culture can be determined by its untranslatable words.

And at the end of the day, there was an attempt to suppress a book. The book wasn't suppressed. It's freely available in whatever it is, close to 50 languages. There was an attempt to suppress the writer. And I'm happy to say the writer wasn't suppressed.

Fundamentalists believe that we don't believe in anything. In their view of the world, they are in possession of absolute certainties, while we are descending into decadence. We will be able to triumph over terrorism not by waging war on it, but through a conscious, fearless way of life.