I always felt that organized religion was just basically a theological insurance scam where they're saying if you spend time with us, guess what, you're going to live forever, you're going to go to some other plain where you're going to be so happy, you'll just be happy all the time, which is also kind of a scary idea to me.

But now the joy is gone and the sadness is back, the sadness feels like something deserved, the price of some not-quite-forgotten betrayal.

I don't want to sound like an ad, a public service ad on TV, but the fact is if you can read, you can walk into a job later on. If you don't, then you've got, the Army, Iraq, I don't know, something like that. It's, it's not as bright. So, that's my little commercial for that.

Some part of me knew from the first that what I wanted was not reality but myth.

I choose to believe in God, but I have serious doubts.

I'm a slow reader, but I usually get through seventy or eighty books a year, most fiction. I don't read in order to study the craft; I read because I like to read

Roland could not understand why anyone would want cocaine or any other illegal drug, for that matter, in a world where such a powerful one as sugar was so plentiful and cheap.