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God gets the great stories. Novelists must make do with more mundane fictions.

I'm Godless. I've had to make my God, and my God is narrative filmmaking.

Back in the 1980s, when I was a lowly editorial assistant by day and trying to be a novelist by night, no god reigned so supreme as the god of literary prose.

No one was ever great without some portion of divine inspiration.

Only a writer who has the sense of evil can make goodness readable.

I think that not only do saints make poor role models, they are incapable in one sense of identifying radically with those of us who are mere mortals. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s mortality says to us that here's a figure who got up every day of his life facing tremendous odds and yet overcame them.

New fiction writers are a special breed in my estimation, and I never dreamed that so many people would be interested, but I remember being led by God.

Similarly, anyone who wishes to understand the mind of the sacred writers must first cleanse his own life, and approach the saints by copying their deeds.

But then in novels the most indifferent hero comes out right at last. Some god comes out of a theatrical cloud and leaves the poor devil ten thousand-a-year and a title.

Saints have no moderation, nor do poets, just exuberance.