If you only write when inspired, you may be a fairly decent poet, but you'll never be a novelist.

I love doing the readings. The readings are the fun bits... The readings are probably the things that actually keep me going on these. If I couldn't do the readings, I wouldn't do the [signing] tours. I get to stand up there and read to a bunch of adults who in many cases nobody's read to in years, since they were about five. They just squat on the floor. That's enormously enjoyable.

25 And the Lord spake unto the Angel that guarded the eastern gate, saying 'Where is the flaming sword that was given unto thee?' 26 And the Angel said, 'I had it here only a moment ago, I must have put it down some where, forget my own head next.' 27 And the Lord did not ask him again.

Spiders' webs only have to be large enough to catch flies.

Richard wrote a mental diary in his head. Dear Diary, he began. On Friday I had a job, a fiance, a home, and a life that made sense. (Well, as much as an life makes sense). Then I found an injured girl bleeding on the pavement and I tried to be Good Samaritan. Now I've got no fiance, no home, no job, and I'm walking around a couple of hundred feet under the streets of London with the projected life expectancy of a suicidal fruit fly.

I will write in words of fire. I will write them on your skin. I will write about desire. Write beginnings, write of sin. You’re the book I love the best, your skin only holds my truth, you will be a palimpsest lines of age rewriting youth. You will not burn upon the pyre. Or be buried on the shelf. You’re my letter to desire: And you’ll never read yourself. I will trace each word and comma As the final dusk descends, You’re my tale of dreams and drama, Let us find out how it ends.

It seems to me that one of the most interesting things about God as a concept, if you decide to believe in God, is that God's ways are unknowable. And God obviously, look at the world around you, does or is responsible for some terrible, terrible, awful things. A young girl kidnapped and kept in the darkness and sexually abused. The deaths of six million Jews. A mudslide that buries a village. All of these things. If God is doing the good stuff, he's got to be doing that stuff too.