I think it's perfectly possible to explain how the universe came about without bringing God into it, but I don't know everything, and there may well be a God somewhere, hiding away. Actually, if he is keeping out of sight, it's because he's ashamed of his followers and all the cruelty and ignorance they're responsible for promoting in his name. If I were him, I'd want nothing to do with them.

The e-book revolution has made it very easy to pay writers a good deal less than what their work is worth. I do strongly believe that we writers ought to hold out for much better royalties.

Read like a butterfly, write like a bee.

You speak of destiny as if it was fixed.

What I couldn't help noticing was that I learned more about the novel in a morning by trying to write a page of one than I'd learned in seven years or so of trying to write criticism

Because the great thing about fairy tales and folk tales is that there is no authentic text. It's not like the text of Paradise Lost or James Joyce's Ulysses, and you have to adhere to that exact text.

I look at the state of the American politics and I scratch my head in wonder. How can the Republican Party, any party, have fallen into to such a state of self-destructiveness - self-destructive stupidity? How is it possible? I don't know. It's an absolute mystery to me.