Lots of white people think black people are stupid. They are stupid themselves for thinking so, but regulation will not make them smarter.

Richard John Neuhaus, in his well-known book The Naked Public Square, tells us that in America, the public square has become openly hostile to religion.

So much emotion goes into writing fiction.

In our sensible zeal to keep religion from dominating our politics, we have created a political and legal culture that presses the religiously faithful to be other than themselves, to act publicly, and sometimes privately as well, as though their faith does not matter to them.

I find it hard to think of myself as selling books. I don't even have a Web site. I want to sit and write, not sell.

There is much depressing evidence that the religious voice is required to stay out of the public square only when it is pressed in a conservative cause.

We do not credit to the ideal of religious freedom when we talk as though religious belief is something of which public-spirited adults should be ashamed.