There is no magic on earth strong enough to wipe out the legacies of one's parents.

The rate of change is global now. I think there's a kind of mind that is so ill at ease with that transformation that it reaches out for something permanent. And religious faith offers that, from simplicities, which you are told are eternal and unchanging, and you can hold on to those like a life raft in a metamorphosing world.

Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can't forgive.

A relationship with an imaginary woman is preferable to a relationship with a real one.

Among the great struggles of man-good/evil, reason/unreason, etc.-there is also this mighty conflict between the fantasy of Home and the fantasy of Away, the dream of roots and the mirage of the journey.

A people that has remained convinced of its greatness and invulnerability, that has chosen to believe such a myth in the face of all the evidence, is a people in the grip of a kind of sleep, or madness.

If I were asked for a one-sentence sound bite on religion, I would say I was against it.