Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts.

People can do bad things with free speech as well as good. You have to defend the Ku Klux Klan as well as Martin Luther King. It's like that. If you're going to defend the principle, then you have to defend people who use the principle badly.

War used to be something you could stand on the nearby hill and watch. Now we have total war; everybody's in it. We have total economics as well. Everything affects everybody. The Malaysian currency shakes, and people around the world are seriously affected.

The Republicans were not always insane. They might've had politics I didn't agree with, but they weren't always actually certifiable.

Chekhov is this poet of melancholy and isolation and of wishing you were somewhere else than where you are.

I can walk into a bookshop and point out a number of books that I find very unattractive in what they say. But it doesn't occur to me to burn the bookshop down. If you don't like a book, read another book. If you start reading a book and you decide you don't like it, nobody is telling you to finish it.

Original thought, original artistic expression is by its very nature questioning, irreverent, iconoclastic.