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.
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.
Friendships are the family we make – not the one we inherit. I’ve always been someone to whom friendship, elective affinities, is as important as family.
Among the great struggles of man-good/evil, reason/unreason, etc.-there is also this mighty conflict between the fantasy of Home and the fantasy of Away, the dream of roots and the mirage of the journey.
Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination and of the heart.
Two things form the bedrock of any open society – freedom of expression and rule of law. If you don’t have those things, you don’t have a free country.
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.
Self-censorship is a lie to yourself; if you are going to be trying to seriously create art, to create literary art, and you decide to hold back, to censor yourself, then you are a fool to yourself and it would be better that you kept your mouth shut and did not speak.
