“Some writers can only deal with childhood experience, because it’s complete. For another kind of writer, life goes on, and he’s able to keep processing that as well.”

And it was strange, I thought, that sorrow lasts and can make a man look forward to death, but the mood of victory fills a moment and then is over.

People come and go all the time; the world has always been in movement.

I will say I am the sum of my books.

It was a good place for getting lost in, a city no one ever knew, a city explored from the neutral heart outward, until after many years, it defined itself into a jumble of clearings separated by stretches of the unknown, through which the narrowest of paths had been cut.

After all, we make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities.

The reason is that they define how I have gone about my business. I have trusted to intuition. I did it at the beginning. I do it even now. I have no idea how things might turn out, where in my writing I might go next.

But everything of value about me is in my books.

Making a book is such a big enterprise.

Ignorant people in preppy clothes are more dangerous to America than oil embargoes.

I became very interested in the Islamic question, and thought I would try to understand it from the roots, ask very simple questions and somehow make a narrative of that discovery.

Home is, I suppose just a child’s idea. A house at night, and a lamp in the house. A place to feel safe.

There are two ways of talking. One is the easy way, where you talk lightly, and the other one is the considered way. The considered way is what I have put my name to.

I don’t feel I can speak with authority for many other people.

If a writer doesn’t generate hostility, he is dead.

You need someone to see what you’ve done, to read it and to understand it and to appreciate what’s gone into it.

The melancholy thing about the world is that it is full of stupid people; and the world is run for the benefit of the stupid and common.

I was raised in church. I was brought up in that life, and I think that it’s very important for everybody to be in touch with their spirituality and to have a relationship with God.

When you grow up on a dairy farm, cows don’t take a day off. So you work every day and my dad always said, ‘No one can outwork you,’

I wasn’t blessed with a healthy childhood self esteem but now that I have built it up by myself it’s even stronger.

Childlike surrender and trust, I believe, is the defining spirit of authentic discipleship.

All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped. Some parents smudge, others crack, a few shatter childhoods completely into jagged little pieces, beyond repair.

My memories of camp – I was four years old to eight years old – they’re fond memories.

Our hearts grow tender with childhood memories and love of kindred, and we are better throughout the year for having, in spirit, become a child again at Christmas-time.

We all have a childhood dream that when there is love, everything goes like silk, but the reality is that marriage requires a lot of compromise.