The ideal reader of my novels is a lapsed Catholic and failed musician, short-sighted, colour-blind, auditorily biased, who has read the books that I have read.

Laugh and the world laughs with you, snore and you sleep alone.

We all need money, but there are degrees of desperation.

The important thing is moral choice. Evil has to exist along with good, in order that moral choice may operate. Life is sustained by the grinding opposition of moral entities.

It's always good to remember where you come from and celebrate it. To remember where you come from is part of where you're going.

...We're a government that believes in everybody having the illusion of free will.

To be left alone is the most precious thing one can ask of the modern world.

I conclude that there is as much sense in nonsense as there is nonsense in sense.

Is it better for a man to have chosen evil than to have good imposed upon him?

Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses to be bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?

Sanity is a handicap and liability if you're living in a mad world.

Where there is darkness, let me be the light. Where there is suffering, let me be kind and compassionate.

Humans have certain properties and characteristics which are intrinsic to them, just as every other organism does. That's human nature.

I've got the best deal on Earth. Where else can I sin and know that I'm forgiven for it?

Why do you have to choose what type of woman you are? Why do you have to label yourself anything?

I believe we all have the Voice of Reason inside us...to gently lead us out of our own self-created hells.

National security rests on the credible threat of a form of warfare universally condemned since the Dark Ages, the wholesale slaughter of noncombatants.

A feeling of sadness and longing, That is not akin to pain, And resembles sorrow only As the mist resembles the rain.

I have always been more interested in experiment, than in accomplishment.

The difference between science and religion is the difference between a willingness to dispassionately consider new evidence and new arguments , and a passionate unwillingness to do so.