*A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return.
*A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.
*Be sure that you go to the author to get at his meaning, not to find yours.
*Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.
*Doubt, it seems to me, is the central condition of a human being in the twentieth century.
*Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.
*I do not need the idea of God to explain the world I live in.
*I hate admitting that my enemies have a point.
*I used to say, 'There is a God-shaped hole in me.' For a long time I stressed the absence, the hole. Now I find it is the shape which has become more important.
*If I were asked for a one-sentence sound bite on religion, I would say I was against it.
*If Woody Allen were a Muslim, he'd be dead by now.
*In this world without quiet corners, there can be no easy escapes from history, from hullabaloo, from terrible, unquiet fuss.
*It is very, very easy not to be offended by a book. You just have to shut it.
*Most of what matters in your life takes place in your absence.
*Names, once they are in common use, quickly become mere sounds, their etymology being buried, like so many of the earth's marvels, beneath the dust of habit.
*One of the extraordinary things about human events is that the unthinkable becomes thinkable.
*Our lives are not what we deserve; they are, let us agree, in many ways deficient.
*Our lives teach us who we are.
*Rock and roll music - the music of freedom frightens people and unleashes all manner of conservative defense mechanisms.
*Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts.
