Every time you finish a book, you have a terrible feeling that there's just never going to be another one. But fortunately, so far, the next one has always shown up.

I'm a novelist. Fortunately I don't have to rule the world.

I was 21 in 1968, so I'm as much a child of the '60s as is possible to be. In those years the subject of religion had really almost disappeared; the idea that religion was going to be a major force in the life of our societies, in the West anyway, would have seemed absurd in 1968.

As a writer, one of the things we all learned from the movies was a kind of compression that didn't exist before people were used to watching films. For instance, if you wanted to write a flashback in a novel, you once had to really contextualize it a lot, to set it up. Now, readers know exactly what you're doing. Close-ups, too.

American literature has always been immigrant.

History could claw upward as well as down. The powerful could be deafened by the cries of the poor.

People must be protected from prejudice against their person. But people cannot be protected from prejudice against their ideas - because otherwise we're all done.