I've caught belief like a disease. I've fallen into belief like I fell in love.

There's a virtue in slowness, which we have lost

When you visualized a man or a woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity . . . that was a quality God's image carried with it . . . when you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination.

Sooner or later... one has to take sides. If one is to remain human.

Human nature is not black and white but black and grey.

So much of a novelist's writing, as I have said, takes place in the unconscious: in those depths the last word is written before the first word appears on the paper. We remember details of our story, we do not invent them.

You think it more difficult to turn air into wine than to turn wine into blood?.