Your life has more blue in it than a James Cameron movie.

One of the great things about the Bible, one of the things I think keeps people coming back to it, is that it's nothing if not perpetually topical. You don't have to dig too deeply into today's paper to find slaves and masters, evil authorities.

I tend toward the pessimistic end of the spectrum, and unfortunately there's little in human history to convince me that pessimism is unwarranted.

As an atheist and lapsed Catholic, I feel the absence of faith in my own life quite acutely.

I am not your God. Or if I am, I'm no God you can seek out for deliverance or explanation. I'm the kind of God who would eat you without compunction if I were hungry.

Don't repackage your fear and try to sell it to me as indifference.

I think that anyone who grew up reading and being taught the Bible, as I did, can't help but have their prose shaped by it later in life. I still have deep, almost primal responses to the language of scripture, and I think that comes through in all my writing.