Oh the Christian church has encouraged enormous immaturity among the peoples who are its primary adherence.

I prepare for death by living.

One of my professors said to me once, "Any god that can be killed off will be killed, but if I can shake up your faith in your god, it means you already don't have much of a god."

So much organized religion, in my opinion, ends up being life-denying.

The Bible is full of dreadful things. There's a Psalm that says "Happy will you be when you take your enemy's children and dash their heads against the stones." Don't read that to me on Sunday morning and say "This is the word of the Lord." It's like that crazy man down in Alabama who wanted to put the Ten Commandments in his courtroom.

I think human beings are almost, by definition, religious people,in the sense that we ask questions of meaning, we anticipate future events, we deal with the issues of mortality from the first time we see a dead bird as a little child.

I don't make that decision [what next book will be] until I've read enough to know that I've got something different to say and I know how to say it.