Truth does not demand belief. Scientists do not join hands every Sunday, singing, 'Yes, gravity is real! I will have faith!'

If the Prodigal Son's a parable, and if Adam and Eve are metaphors, then maybe God is just figure of speech.

The very concept of sin comes from the Bible. Christianity offers to solve a problem of its own making! Would you be thankful to a person who cut you with a knife in order to sell you a bandage?

I am an atheist because there is no evidence for the existence of God. That should be all that needs to be said about it: no evidence, no belief.

Insanity is believing your hallucinations are real. Religion is believing that other peoples' hallucinations are real.

All you have to do is walk into any children's hospital and you know there is no God. Prayer doesn't make any difference. Those people pray for their beloved children to live and they die.

People are always asking, "What's the purpose of life?" That's easy. Relieve suffering. Create beauty. Make gardens.

If the answers to prayer are merely what God wills all along, then why pray?

I'm proud to be an atheist - it helps me stand for so much more and fall for so much less.

Faith is a cop-out. If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits. It is intellectual bankruptcy.

How happy can you be when you think every action and thought is being monitored by a judgmental ghost ?

Insanity can inhibit a person from thinking consciously about his or her thoughts and actions that can result him or her to perform dangerous acts without realizing at all.

We dream primarily the same way that we have consciousness of the world for the same reason. Basically, that our brains evolve to simulate reality and to control what's happening around us.

If you die without agency as a child, but you have agency in your body [in the novel], how is it to be enacted unless it is being reimagined by a writer?

It's not how smart you are that matters, what really counts is how you are smart.

There's not enough of us in the Northern Territory in Federal Parliament to squabble.

I'd like to own Intel... I'd like to own Microsoft... I'd love to have Warner Bros in my hip pocket.

We remove mountains, and make seas our smooth highway; nothing can resist us. We war with rude Nature; and, by our resistless engines, come off always victorious, and loaded with spoils.

I derived my strength from daily mass and communion.

We throw all our attention on the utterly idle question whether A has done as well as B, when the only question is whether A has done as well as he could.

Sometimes I feel that the people I'm writing are more real to me than the people around me. When you take that imaginative leap, you're living so much in that world.