When you write, you write out of your best self. Everything else drops away.

One of the problems with defending free speech is you often have to defend people that you find to be outrageous and unpleasant and disgusting.

I'm not a big fan of there being voiceovers in movies. I really prefer it when the film tells it story.

Religion is responsible for a lot of the problems in the history of the world and it's not something that I practice or recommend, but to each his own.

Once you get that instinct for the fictiveness, the fictionality of fiction, it kind of sets you free.

Khattam-Shud,' he said slowly, 'is the Arch-Enemy of all Stories, even of language itself. He is the Prince of Silence and the Foe of Speech. And because everything ends, because dreams end, stories end, life ends, at the finish of everything we use his name. "It's finished," we tell one another, "it's over. Khattam-Shud: The End.

The writers of the French enlightenment had deliberately used blasphemy as a weapon, refusing to accept the power of the Church to set limiting points on thought.