What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.

When you write you in a way write out of what you think of as your best self, the part of you that is lacking in foibles and weaknesses and egotism and vanities and so on. You're just trying to really say something as truthful as you can out of the best that you have in you.

Shame is like everything else; live with it for long enough and it becomes part of the furniture.

If you want to draw people into the story, you really have to write as if you're writing a novel and make these actually-existing people, including the actually-existing person with my name, into a believable person on the page. And that requires distance. That requires not being right up against the events you're talking about.

I used to say, 'There is a God-shaped hole in me.' For a long time I stressed the absence, the hole. Now I find it is the shape which has become more important.

From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable.

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