What can't be cured must be endured.

Too many people spouting too many words, and in the end those words will turn to bullets and stones.

The acceptance that all that is solid has melted into the air, that reality and morality are not givens but imperfect human constructs, is the point from which fiction begins.

People don't like being around despair. Our tolerance for the truly hopeless, for those who are irredeemably broken by life is strictly limited. The sob stories we like are the ones that end before we're bored.

If I had simply wanted to trade on an insult to Islam, I could have done it in a sentence rather than writing a 250,000-word novel, a work of fiction.

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

I for one don't need a supreme "sacred" arbiter in order to be a moral being.