56 Quotes by Stephen L. Carter

I find it hard to think of myself as selling books. I don’t even have a Web site. I want to sit and write, not sell.

I think of my novels as entertainments.

So much emotion goes into writing fiction.

We do not credit to the ideal of religious freedom when we talk as though religious belief is something of which public-spirited adults should be ashamed.

There is much depressing evidence that the religious voice is required to stay out of the public square only when it is pressed in a conservative cause.

Even in 2012, if there’s a black character in the movies or on television that’s a professional, if we even hear about their backgrounds they’re always ’up from the streets.

We often ask our citizens to split their public and private selves, telling them in effect that it is fine to be religious in private, but there is something askew when those private beliefs become the basis for public action.

I bristle again. I have never liked being called clever, especially by residents of the paler nation. It never quite means the same thing as intelligent or even bright, but carries instead an intimation of a low animal cunning. Perhaps the semiotician in me overreacts in assuming that conversations are racially charged; but so many conversations are.

The very aspect of religions that many of their critics most fear – that the religiously devout, in the name of their faith, take positions that differ from approved state policy – is one of their strengths.