Ideas are interesting to me, and religions are a place where ideas have been very subtly embodied for thousands of years. All literature started as sacred literature.

Self-censorship is a lie to yourself; if you are going to be trying to seriously create art, to create literary art, and you decide to hold back, to censor yourself, then you are a fool to yourself and it would be better that you kept your mouth shut and did not speak.

Reading is a very different thing than performing. In fact, one of the things I think that doesn't work in books on tape is if the person doing the reading "acts" too much; it becomes irritating to you listening to it.

It is very, very easy not to be offended by a book. You just have to shut it.

One of the strange things about violent and authoritarian regimes is they don't like the glare of negative publicity.

It may be that the books that were best liked in your lifetime are not the ones that are best liked 100 years later.

A mature society understands that at the heart of democracy is argument.