Whatever you do with your life-whatever you end up achieving or not achieving-the great gift you have in you to give to the world is the gift of who you alone are; your way of seeing things, and saying things, and feeling about things, that is like nobody else’s. If so much as a single one of you were missing, there would be an empty place at the great feast of life that nobody else in all creation could fill.

A Christian isn't necessarily any nicer than anybody else, just better informed.

Lust is the craving for salt of a man who is dying of thirst.

I don't think Christ would give a hoot whether you mentioned Christ to them or not. What matters - I'm speaking arrogantly and absurdly - to him is, are you living the kind of life that I embodied? Whether you believe in Christ or don't, who cares?

The preaching is part of the reason I don't go to church. Plus, I don't know, it was never part of my tradition.

In New England, especially, [faith] is like sex. It's very personal. You don't bring it out and talk about it.

I'm trying to listen to my past, listen to what's most deeply going on inside myself, my creative set of fictional characters, a fictional world - to listen to that world, to search.