Rock and roll music - the music of freedom frightens people and unleashes all manner of conservative defense mechanisms.

If there is a choice between absolute safety and freedom, then freedom must always prevail.

All art began as sacred art, you know? I mean, all painting began as religious painting. All writing began as religious writing.

A book is not completed till it's read.

In the end, the thing that's important about free expression is that it's the right from which all other rights are derived. If you can't articulate ideas and if you can't articulate critiques of other peoples' ideas, then you're powerless. What always increases the power of an authoritarian regime is whether it can successfully prevent people from expressing themselves.

Meaning is a shaky edifice we build out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old fillms, small victories, people hated, people loved; perhaps it is because our sense of what is the case is constructed from such inadequate materials that we defend it so fiercely, even to death.

I remember when I was young, many cities in the Muslim world were cosmopolitan cities with a lot of culture.