If by some bizarre chance there turns out to be a god [...], I'm willing to bet he's an atheist too.

Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.

My friend Lou Reed came to the end of his song. So very sad.But hey, Lou, you'll always take a walk on the wild side. Always a perfect day.

Not all possibilities are open to us. The world is finite; our hopes spill over its rim.

The suicide bomber's imagination leads him to believe in a brilliant act of heroism, when in fact he is simply blowing himself up pointlessly and taking other people's lives.

I admit it: above all things, I fear absurdity.

A novel, I think, is partly about the contemporary and partly about the eternal, and it's the balance of that that's difficult to achieve.