“One of the strange things about violent and authoritarian regimes is they don’t like the glare of negative publicity.”

Liberate yourself, because no one else is going to liberate you.

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.

The negative is comparable to the composer’s score and the print to its performance. Each performance differs in subtle ways.

The negative is the score, and the print the performance.

There’s so much negativity on social media, I don’t want to add to that.

The ‘machine-gun’ approach to photography – by which many negatives are made with the hope that one will be good – is fatal to serious results.

People are negative no matter what you do.

A photograph is not an accident – is a concept. It exists at, or before, the moment of exposure of the negative.

An eagle uses the negative energy of a storm to fly even higher.

I don’t care about people who don’t care about me. If people are negative or mean, then that’s their issue. Screw them.