Under the guise of protecting us from ourselves, the right and the left are becoming ever more aggressive in regulating behavior.
Unless you have read and absorbed the best that can be read and absorbed, you will not think clearly or well.
Hamlet, Kiekegaard, Kafka are ironists in the wake of Jesus. All Western irony is a repetition of Jesus' enigmasriddles, in amalgam with the ironies of Socrates.
Shakespeare is universal.
The morality of scholarship, as currently practiced, is to encourage everyone to replace difficult pleasures by pleasures universally accessible precisely because they are easier.
We read to find ourselves, more fully and more strangely than otherwise we could hope to find.
To read in the service of any ideology is not, in my judgment, to read at all.
Charity begins at home, and justice begins next door.
They're done by guys who have talked a good game and then have scrambled together the simulacrum of a drama, so actors are habituated to sometimes having to save a picture on the floor because it's usually part of their job, but they'd rather have a writer doing his job, so that they can do theirs. But I like nothing better than working with actors.
So I'll set a cycle in motion and pop it into record and I'll lay down a drum pattern, a bass line, a keyboard and guitar part, and once the groove is going I launch into the song and sing my song over the top.
I do believe that if you reach a just and fair settlement between the Israelis and the Palestinians it will have a massive influence on countering extremism. Which is not to say that the Israel-Palestinian situation is the source of the problem, but it is very potent fuel.