I think the beard helps offset - it's the only hairstyle I can really pull off. But I'm often clean-shaven. I think, you know, for me, it's not that signifier. What's interesting to me though is although the beard isn't a signifier of that to me, other people very often think that it is. And so people in America might react differently. The, you know, border agents might react differently. The guys at airport security might react differently.

When the machine of a human being is turned on, it seems to produce a protagonist, just as a television produces an image.

When terrorism strikes, divisive anger is a natural response.

Lived religion is a very different thing from strict textual analysis. Very few people of any faith live their lives as literalist interpretations of scripture.

The anger is useful too because when things about the world upset you, that is really a fertile feeling to channel into fiction and to put out into books.

Transience is what is normal. The problem is that we are busily trying to create political structures and cultural expressions that deny that and to deny that is to deny the basic idea of what is human.

Novels function and the power of novels function because of their stories.