Sin is absence of God. Nothing more, nothing less.

The speed of the human mind is remarkable. So is its inability to face the obvious.

Faith is the enemy of discovery.

Sometimes I think that novelists suffer from P.C.S.: Perpetual Childhood Syndrome.

If God resides anywhere ... surely he shelters behind barricades of pure chance.

You can tell nothing from a man's appearance, nothing except the depths of your own prejudice.

When you look around now we have the war on terror. Yes, okay, the World Trade Center was sort of like a single act of war, but nothing else has been. We've turned it into war. We're talking about a bunch of semi-lunatic, fanatic criminals. That's the way they should be treated.

Most of those people who saw themselves as literary types at university became bank managers.

Grief and guilt. A powerful combination. Guilt like a liquid, a thin liquor, seeping everywhere, informing everything, saturating the whole-corrosive, like seawater, scented with the rich stench of ordure and corruption, and carrying with it hard, abrasive shards of grief.