If you take a look at history, you will find that the understanding of what is good and evil has always existed before the individual religions. The religions were only invented by people afterwards, in order to express this idea.

Sometimes people have said that Islam, in its own calendar, is still only in the Middle Ages.

It is often said by religious people that without its framework, there is no sense of right or wrong. My view is that religion comes after ethics.

Life is elsewhere. Cross frontiers. Fly away.

In general, writers shouldn't be killed for what they write, though I can think of exceptions.

I for one don't need a supreme "sacred" arbiter in order to be a moral being.

Mo Yan is the Chinese equivalent of the Soviet Russian apparatchik writer Mikhail Sholokhov: a patsy of the regime.