“I think sometimes there might be an advantage in making people aware how worn and stale these old transgressions are. It might take some of the shine off them for those who are tempted.”

“Think how much less stupefying the last fifty years might have been if people had actually read Marx.”

“I mean only respect when I say that your mother has always struck me as someone with whom the Lord might have chosen to spend some part of His mortal time”

“I’m not going to force some theory on a mystery and make foolishness of it, just because that is what people who talk about it normally do.”

“A man can know his father, or his son, and there might still be nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension.”

“I think that to be a good writer, you have to put yourself on the line, you have to think deeply about what is meaningful to you and you have to make a good-faith effort to speak from the integrity of your own deep experience.... People don't think about assessing what is the deepest narrative for them. I think that that's about 99 percent of the subject of literature.... Write from it.”

“I experience religious dread whenever I find myself thinking that I know the limits of God’s grace, since I am utterly certain it exceeds any imagination a human being might have of it. God does, after all, so love the world.”