I never get involved in policy. Never.

I don't think I'll ever be comfortable posing for a photographer; I was never trained.

I sometimes think I might be autistic because I like to know - I need to know - my beginnings and my ends. I don't have to be in control of it, but I need to know what's going on.

I think that we have to be constantly asking ourselves, 'How do we calculate the risk?' And sometimes we don't calculate it correctly; we either overstate it or understate it.

Make your creed simply and broadly out of the revelation of God, and you will keep it to the end.

When people are taken out of their depths they lose their heads, no matter how charming a bluff they may put up.

It takes these very simple-minded instructions - 'Go fetch a number, add it to this number, put the result there, perceive if it's greater than this other number' - but executes them at a rate of, let's say, 1,000,000 per second. At 1,000,000 per second, the results appear to be magic.

Creative life should be more than preaching to the converted, more than going for a core audience of 100,000 people. It should be taking risks, challenging the readership and having enough faith in one's own talent and craft to take readers on that ride.

I can't give you 150 takes. I can't even give you 30 different ways of doing it! I don't have the talent or the range for it.

Practice radical humility. Take no credit for your talents, intellectual abilities, aptitudes, or proficiencies. Be in a state of awe and bewilderment.

The Bible... provides no guide to reading the Bible. In fact, it is full of such inconsistencies, contradictions, lacunae, obscurities, baffling tales, and poetic imagery that to quote it at all is to select from conflicting alternative passages. Every quotation is therefore necessarily an interpretation.

Preachers in pulpits talked about what a great message is in the book. No matter what you do, somebody always imputes meaning into your books.