Your Heart Becomes Gangrenous In

Since It Is No Longer Permissible To Disparage Any Single Faith Or Creed, Let Us Start Disparaging All Of Them... A Religion Is A Belief System With No Basis In Reality Whatever. Religious Belief Is Without Reason And Without Dignity, And Its Record Is Near-universally Dreadful.

It Sounds Schmaltzy To Say, But Fiction Is Much More To Do With Love Than People Admit Or Acknowledge. The Novelist Has To Not Only Love His Characters - Which You Do, Without Even Thinking About It, Just As You Love Your Children. But Also To Love The Reader, And That's What I Mean By The Pleasure Principle.

Like Fundamentalist Judaism And Medieval Christianity, Islam Is Totalist. That Is To Say, It Makes A Total Claim On The Individual.

On Any Longer View, Man Is Only Fitfully Committed To The Rational -- To Thinking, Seeing, Learning, Knowing. Believing Is What He's Really Proud Of.

I Think A Lot Of People Who Read Fiction Are Interested In Subtlety. But They Wouldn't Like My Stuff. It's A Bit Too Violent For Many Tastes.