If you want to be a serious writer, then you have to write what there is to write about. If you're going to pull your punches and second-guess yourself and not do things because you're worried, then don't write. Stay home and do something else.

Originality is dangerous. It challenges, questions, overturns assumptions, unsettles moral codes.

The real risks for any artist are taken in pushing the work to the limits of what is possible, in the attempt to increase the sum of what it is possible to think. Books become good when they go to this edge and risk falling over it -when they endanger the artist by reason of what he has, or has not, artistically dared.

I get a lot of letters - a lot of letters saying, who knew that you were funny?

People are always telling me that they've seen people reading my books on the subway, or the beach, or whenever.

I'm a big-city boy. What I like is big cities. It's not just what I like. It's what I write about.

I have never really thought of myself as a writer about religion. And I think one of the things that happened to me as a result of all that is that I think it did for some people, many people, obscure the kind of writer that I actually am.