“Scientists turn reckless and mutter like gamblers who cannot stop betting. Scientists are buffoons, not because they are rational but because the cosmos is irrational.”

In short, the body is a machine, subject to the same laws of electricity and mechanics as an electron or clock.

Every reader gets something different from a book and every reader, in a sense, completes it in a different way.

I also like the magic realist writers, such as Borges and Marquez, and feel that interesting truths can be learned about our world by exploring highly distorted worlds.

With a background in science I am extremely interested in the meeting ground of science, theology, and philosophy, especially the ethical questions at the border of science and theology.

You make one good shot and it brings you back the next time. With writing a long book there has to be at least one bit that has some magic in it that you can go back to.

If you think about fiction writing as a spectrum, where at one end of the spectrum in the infrared, are the story tellers, and the people for whom creation of wonderful characters and telling a good story is the most important thing.

I value my correspondence with writers…

I have too many friends who tell me that they spend the first hour of every morning going through their e-mail messages. I’d like to use my time more carefully.

It’s the journeyto get there. It’s a way of thinking and it’s an intellectual curiosity, a desire to know how the world works, and to know what the fundamental principles of the world are, and to know our place in it.

I believe that we need to slow down.

Rather, each act is an island in time, to be judged on its own. … It is a world of impulse. It is a world of sincerity.

It’s a flow of chemicals and electrical currents, and it developed over millions of years in the process of evolution to aid in the procreation of the species.

Most people have learned to live in the moment.

I still will sit down at the piano and play when I am wrestling with something emotionally or just want to move into the musical world.

I appreciate the idea of the individual person battling the society – which is true in all his books.

While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back.

When you make a bet, you’re saying something.

Hold’em is a game of calculated aggression. If your cards are good enough for you to call a bet, they are good enough to raise with.

Since each religion claims that it is the only true one and that the others are invalid’, the king explained, ‘I have decided to hedge my bets’.

Go ahead, climb up onto the velvet top of the highest stakes table. Place yourself as the bet. Look God in the eyes and finally, for once in your life, lose.

I’ll fight both of them in one night, and I bet it won’t go 12 rounds.

I bet they didn’t tell you that was in the gift bag.

Drugs are a bet with your mind.

You can bet everything will come to an end. It’s going to be ugly and it’s going to be a mess, and it’s going to be something that somebody did in the name of God.