It's magical thinking to imagine that the reason unspeakable things are being perpetrated by younger and younger people is that they've fallen under the influence of seductive, lascivious, prurient, and violent material in books, films, television. A great deal of this type of censorship has to do with absolving parents of responsibility - parents who just plop their kids in front of the television and leave them there hour upon hour.

You don't have to be in the habit of going to church to listen to such a literary minister; you don't have to be a believer to be moved by Mr. Buechner's faith.

The characters in my novels, from the very first one, are always on some quixotic effort of attempting to control something that is uncontrollable - some element of the world that is essentially random and out of control.

If you presume to love something, you must love the process of it much more than you love the finished product.

You can give yourself a headache trying to decipher the tattoos on a naked man who’s leaping up and down on a bed.

When you legislate personal belief, you're in violation of freedom of religion.

The former stewardess glared at her ex-pilot husband as if he had been speaking, and thinking, in the absence of sufficient oxygen.