“I have never really thought of myself as a writer about religion. And I think one of the things that happened to me as a result of all that is that I think it did for some people, many people, obscure the kind of writer that I actually am.”

Every time you finish a book, you have a terrible feeling that there’s just never going to be another one. But fortunately, so far, the next one has always shown up.

Between the adored and the adorer falls the shadow.

I’ve been worrying about God a little bit lately. It seems like he’s been in a bad mood. And I think it has to do with the quality of lovers he’s been getting.

In the cookie of life, friends are the chocolate chips.

From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable.

Faith without doubt is addiction.

Reality is a question of perspective.

What one writer can make in the solitude of one room is something no power can easily destroy.

If you take a look at history, you will find that the understanding of what is good and evil has always existed before the individual religions. The religions were only invented by people afterwards, in order to express this idea.

Science fiction is always a vehicle for ideas. It’s the form which allows either movies or books to be an exploration of how we should live.

Free speech is not just free speech for people you admire. It’s also for people who you think of as reprehensible.

Too many people spouting too many words, and in the end those words will turn to bullets and stones.

Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, power to retell it, to rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change, truly are powerless, because they cannot think new thoughts.

If you actually want to change your world, there is a better way of doing it than blowing yourself up.

I have always thought that these two ways of talking, one is the fantastic, the fable, the fairy tale, and the other being history, the scholarly study of what happened, I think they’re both amazing ways to understand human nature.

So India’s problem turns out to be the world’s problem. What happened in India has happened in God’s name. The problem’s name is God.

After two world wars, the collapse of fascism, nazism, communism and colonialism and the end of the cold war, humanity has entered a new phase of its history.

No settlement with the majority community is possible, as no Hindu leader speaking with any authority shows any concern or genuine desire for it.

The greatness of a community is most accurately measured by the compassionate actions of its members.

And a third thing is the understanding of the Church as a community, a communion which is just a hierarchy but the people of God, whose servants are the priests and bishops.

It must always be remembered that all laws are naturally and inevitably evolved by the strongest force in a community, and in the last analysis made for the protection of the dominant class.

Too much and too long, we seem to have surrendered community excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things.

People differ in capacity, skill, health, strength; and unequal fortune is a necessary result of unequal condition. Such inequality is far from being disadvantageous either to individuals or to the community.

I’m used to people kind of knowing me in the community.