An idea or institution may arise for one reason and be maintained for quite a different reason.

Creeds made in Dark Ages are like drawings made in dark rooms.

No pope ever condemned slavery.

Any body of men who believe in hell will persecute whenever they have the power.

The making of an Atheist implies a mental stimulation and training which brings into play the primary factors of social progress.

The theist and the scientist are rival interpreters of nature, the one retreats as the other advances.

I AM what is called a Feminist. Thirty years ago I left a monastery and began a sane human existence. Within two or three years, I find, I was defending the rights of women.

In my whole career, in fact, I can remember only two first nights when a show was at its peak on the first night. And I just wish we could devise a system where critics came not on a single evening but were given a choice of performances to attend.

If you are feeling something, then Shakespeare felt it and wrote about it - and wrote about it so eloquently.

It is strange how your understanding of a play changes. It normally happens after a performance and you suddenly think, 'So that's what that line really means' - it's like a light going on.

I do so much revising as I go along; I wonder how I could write books if I hadn't grown up in the computer age. I think I'd be a very different writer. I find myself cutting and pasting, changing things around and deleting whole paragraphs constantly.

I have a very long pre-writing process where I'm jotting down ideas in a notebook and ripping out relevant newspaper articles - a long fact-finding mission.

Plagiarism has been around far longer than the Internet. In fact, I had a poem published in 'Seventeen' magazine when I was 15 years old. About a year later I was informed that there was a girl who used that same poem to win a statewide poetry competition in Alabama. It took months for people to put together that this had happened.