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.

I think of my novels as entertainments.

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

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.

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.

The very aspect of religions that many of their critics most fear - that the religiously devout, in the name of their faith, take positions that differ from approved state policy - is one of their strengths.

If people believe that they are marrying out of love and free choice rather than out of duty, they are more likely to decide, if love should die, that the free choice to join together is no more significant than the free choice to part, and to look for love elsewhere; those married out of duty expect less love to begin with, and what duty has brought together, duty may keep together.