Too many people had spent too long demonizing or totemizing me to listen seriously to what I had to say.

Ideas are interesting to me, and religions are a place where ideas have been very subtly embodied for thousands of years. All literature started as sacred literature.

I do not envy people who think they have a complete explanation of the world, for the simple reason that they are obviously wrong.

Be sure that you go to the author to get at his meaning, not to find yours.

I do have a lot of time for people in my life, and friendship is a very important subject for me. I think I'm unusual among the writers I know in that respect.

If you're going to write a memoir, try to be as honest and open as you can.

Our lives disconnect and reconnect, we move on, and later we may again touch one another, again bounce away. This is the felt shape of a human life, neither simply linear nor wholly disjunctive nor endlessly bifurcating, but rather this bouncey-castle sequence of bumpings-into and tumblings-apart.