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After I left the convent, for 15 years I was worn out with religion, I wanted nothing whatever to do with it. I felt disgusted with it. If I saw someone reading a religious book on a train, I'd think, how awful.

It was during my time at secondary school that I abandoned religion.

I decided to take God and organized religion seriously, and to reject the secular life which in my teens had looked attractive because it allowed me to act in any way that I wanted.

I was just then going through a healthy reaction from the orthodoxy of my youth; religion had become for me not so much a possession as an obsession, which I was trying to throw off, and this iconoclastic tale of an imaginary tribe was the result.

It doesn't hurt my feeling when I get vilified by fundamentalist religious people. I've actually made comedy out of it. I've made light of that.

I find the whole business of religion profoundly interesting. But it does mystify me that otherwise intelligent people take it seriously.

I've been a little bit obsessed with religion, without being a religious person, for about a decade.

I don't take myself as seriously as some people think, and I'd hate anyone to think I was preaching. That's the last thing I want.