If the culture shifts, if people think differently about women, the art will shift, too. You can't ask art to make social change. It's not what it's for.

But there's one thing we must all be clear about: terrorism is not the pursuit of legitimate goals by some sort of illegitimate means. Whatever the murderers may be trying to achieve, creating a better world certainly isn't one of their goals. Instead they are out to murder innocent people.

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

The only way to find out why someone decides to engage in armed combat is to look at their individual personality.

Why obliterate the exceptional merely in order to make the outstanding look finer than it was?

Wherever goodness lay, it did not lie in ritual, unthinking obeisance before a deity but rather, perhaps, in the slow clumsy, error-strewn working out of an individual or collective path.

But I - and I just think it's very - one of the problems of defending the extraordinary principle of freedom of speech is that you have to defend freedom of speech for people like that too.