All my adult life, if I didn't have several hours a day to sit in a room by myself, I would get antsy and irritable.

If I had simply wanted to trade on an insult to Islam, I could have done it in a sentence rather than writing a 250,000-word novel, a work of fiction.

There's going to be no more compromise on issues where there should not be compromise. Enough with appeasement or apology and mollifying, all that. To hell with all that. I'm just going to fight my corner.

If you live in free countries, you don't have to spend all your life arguing about freedom because it is all around you. It seems redundant to make a lot of noise about something when, in fact, there it is. But if someone tries to remove it, it becomes important for you to formulate your own defenses of it.

Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.

One of the things a writer is for is to say the unsayable, speak the unspeakable and ask difficult questions.

So Thomas Pynchon wants a private life and no photographs and nobody to know his home address. I can dig it, I can relate to that (but, like, he should try it when it's compulsory instead of a free-choice option).