I'm a born - again atheist.

We should stop going around babbling about how we're the greatest democracy on earth, when we're not even a democracy. We are a sort of militarised republic.

Nothing human is finally calculable; even to ourselves we are strange.

Nonprofit status is what created the Bible Belt. The tax code brought religion back to this country.

Write what you think, what you imagine, what you suspect!

I went to Europe to live in 1961. I'd never have written Julian if it hadn't been for the sequestered life that I led in Rome and the classical library at the America Academy.

By and large, serious fiction was the work of victims who portrayed victims for an audience of victims who, it was oddly assumed, would want to see their lives realistically portrayed.