Anybody who has read any biblical scholarship knows that every scholar struggles over completely intractable problems with the original texts, or what they have to work from. It's one of the great, powerful, mysterious objects that have come down through history. This does not translate into literal interpretation for me.

It seems to me some people just go around lookin' to get their faith unsettled. That has been the fashion for the last hundred years or so.

What an embarrassment that was, being somewhere because there was nowhere else for you to be.

I think the attempt to defend belief can unsettle it, in fact, because there is always an inadequacy in argument about ultimate things.

Ordinary things have always seemed numinous to me

I can’t believe we will forget our sorrows altogether. That would mean forgetting that we had lived, humanly speaking. Sorrow seems to me to be a great part of the substance of human life.

The mind has a complex life that can seem quite autonomous - dreams, obsessions, unwilled memory are all instances of this.