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.

Rumor is rarely more interesting than fact, but it is always more readily available.

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.

I think that black fiction authors have to work very hard to avoid being typed as seeking only a black audience.

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.

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.