Once you get that instinct for the fictiveness, the fictionality of fiction, it kind of sets you free.

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.

If you have children you worry about the world you're leaving them.

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.

From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable.

I do not need the idea of God to explain the world I live in.

To see things plainly, you have to cross a frontier.