The author lives with one foot in an everyday world and the other feeling about anxiously for a foothold in another more precarious one.

It takes a good many years and some pretty hard knocks to make people tolerant.

It is only in his head that man is heroic; in the pit of his stomach he is always a coward.

when knowledge comes in at the door, fear and superstition fly out of the window.

I began to feel that if religion was either an illusion or a revelation, it was simpler to accept it as an illusion.

Of one thing the reader can be certain: the more easily anything reads, the harder it has been to write.

Every writer knows the terror of an unexpected success. How to carry on? How to repeat it?