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

We cannot allow religious hooligans to place limiting points on thought.

Until you know who you are you can’t write.

I write books I'd enjoy reading, I'm the reader standing behind my shoulder.

I admit it: above all things, I fear absurdity.

What's real and what's true aren't necessarily the same.

To understand just one life you have to swallow the world ... do you wonder, then, that I was a heavy child?

He knew what he knew: that the real world was full of magic, so magical worlds could easily be real.

How do you defeat terrorism? Don’t be terrorized.

One of the things a writer is for is to say the unsayable, speak the unspeakable and ask difficult questions.

Masks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull.

Once you put a thought into the world, it can be disagreed with, but it can't be unthought.

Where there is no belief, there is no blasphemy.

We are the storytelling animal.

Our lives, our stories, flowed into one another's, were no longer our own, individual, discrete.

Reality is a question of perspective.

For every snake, there is a ladder; for every ladder,a snake

The moment you declare a set of ideas to be immune from criticism, satire, derision, or contempt, freedom of thought becomes impossible.

Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.