Sin is absence of God. Nothing more, nothing less.

Most of those people who saw themselves as literary types at university became bank managers.

When you look around now we have the war on terror. Yes, okay, the World Trade Center was sort of like a single act of war, but nothing else has been. We've turned it into war. We're talking about a bunch of semi-lunatic, fanatic criminals. That's the way they should be treated.

I was a boarding school product from the age of eight, and I hated it. Though I do have a theory that boarding school is good training for writers because its so desperately lacking in privacy: you make space for yourself by having an interior life.

You can tell nothing from a man's appearance, nothing except the depths of your own prejudice.

Faith is the enemy of discovery.

If God resides anywhere ... surely he shelters behind barricades of pure chance.