One sees a trend in our political and legal cultures toward treating religious beliefs as arbitrary and unimportant, a trend supported by a rhetoric that implies that there is something wrong with religious devotion.

We often ask our citizens to split their public and private selves, telling them in effect that it is fine to be religious in private, but there is something askew when those private beliefs become the basis for public action.

When you shoot someone who is fleeing, it's not self-defense. It's an execution.

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.

To be black and an intellectual in America is to live in a box. On the box is a label, not of my own choosing.

So much emotion goes into writing fiction.

I think of my novels as entertainments.