If I were going to convert to any religion I would probably choose Catholicism because it at least has female saints and the Virgin Mary.

If you feel that there's the author and then the character, then the book is not working. People have a habit of identifying the author with the narrator, and you can't, obviously, be all of the narrators in all of your books, or else you'd be a very strange person indeed.

Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.

Fear has a smell, as love does.

Happiness is a garden walled with glass: there's no way in or out.

I'm not sure I really am a Humanist. I describe myself as a rigorous agnostic, which means that you cannot declare as a matter of material truth something that is in fact a matter of spiritual belief.

I meet a lot of readers who first encountered my work in school. And I can only assume there is another group who would run away very fast if they saw me coming, for exactly the same reason. Reading is individual, and not all tastes are alike.