The enemy for the fanatic is pleasure, which makes it extremely important to continue to indulge in pleasure. Dance madly. That is how you get rid of terrorism.

To put it as simply as possible: I am not a Muslim.[...] I do not accept the charge of apostacy, because I have never in my adult life affirmed any belief, and what one has not affirmed one can not be said to have apostasized from. The Islam I know states clearly that 'there can be no coercion in matters of religion'. The many Muslims I respect would be horrified by the idea that they belong to their faith purely by virtue of birth, and that a person who freely chose not to be a Muslim could therefore be put to death.

Memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else's version more than his own.

After a long, hopeless war, people will settle for peace, at almost any price.

If a birth is the fall-out from the explosion caused by the union of two unstable elements, then perhaps a half-life is all we can expect.

Out-of-step intellectuals like Noam Chomsky and the deceased Edward Said have often been dismissed as crazy extremists, 'anti-American,' and in Mr. Said's case even, absurdly, as apologists for Palestinian 'terrorism.'

Actually, I don't even like parties. I would much prefer a room with four friends who sit around and have dinner. I detest nightclubs. And I don't like places where the noise is so loud you can't talk to people.