Censorship is the thing that stops you doing what you want to do, and what writers want to talk about is what they do, not what stops them doing it.

Free societies...are societies in motion, and with motion comes tension, dissent, friction. Free people strike sparks, and those sparks are the best evidence of freedom's existence.

It was, for him, an object lesson in the importance of the “better out than in” free speech argument—that it was better to allow even the most reprehensible speech than to sweep it under the carpet, better to publicly contest and perhaps deride what was loathsome than to give it the glamour of taboo, and that, for the most part, people could be trusted to tell the good from the bad.

They fuck you up, your mum and dad? No, that wasn't it at all. Well, they did do that, perhaps, but they also allowed you to become the person, and the writer, that you had it in you to be.

human beings do not perceive things whole; we are not gods but wounded creatures, cracked lenses, capable only of fractured perceptions

What one writer can make in the solitude of one room is something no power can easily destroy.