All the answers you may wish for lie within faith, but it demands a complete and incontinent surrender, an immersion as total as any baptism. Indeed baptism is a kind of enactment of the surrender: you bathe in faith, you swim in it, you live by it, surrounded by it, buoyed up by it, engulfed by it. You drown in it, for at times it takes your breath away as entirely as any lungful of water.... All the answers lie in faith; and when you lose your faith you have no choice but to substitute for if a philosophy that deliberately and coldly offers no answers at all.

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

Grief and guilt. A powerful combination. Guilt like a liquid, a thin liquor, seeping everywhere, informing everything, saturating the whole-corrosive, like seawater, scented with the rich stench of ordure and corruption, and carrying with it hard, abrasive shards of grief.

Sometimes I think that novelists suffer from P.C.S.: Perpetual Childhood Syndrome.

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

The speed of the human mind is remarkable. So is its inability to face the obvious.

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