Quotes About Doubt

As an undergraduate, I took a theology course titled Religion as Writing. If writing can be considered a form of faith, then inevitably doubt has to accompany it.

I have a tremendous support from a lot of the Underground fans. They believe in me, they want to see me do well, and they're behind me. But there are a lot of people out there who don't believe it, and so I want to separate perception and reality. I want to be able to do that.

To sustain your belief through situations that completely undermine it is quite something.

I'm trying to undermine the basis of Christian belief.

My faith was undermined by the same sort of things that make people skeptics of religion in general. Part of it was, there was no real place for me in Judaism. Maybe if there was I would've hung in there, but I was attracted to the social-justice aspects of Judaism, and I was attracted to the prophets.

We live in an extremely anxious age in which the core of our beliefs has been undermined to a great extent by scientific thinking.

In philosophy you're never 100% sure. You're always undermining what you think you know. That's always been my philosophy and my intellectual ethos.

I'm not going to tell a person how to think, don't believe in that. What I want to do, when I write these books, is just to say don't be so sure of yourself. Let me pull the carpet out from underneath you, and let's see if you can still find the footing.

Can't do it, simply cause underneath 'em is too ugly.

I think a lot of people questioned if I could catch underneath.

When everything is perfectly orderly and understandable, there has to be one thing that puts everything into question.

Large skepticism leads to large understanding. Small skepticism leads to small understanding. No skepticism leads to no understanding.

Faith must trample under foot all reason, sense, and understanding.

You know what 'DOUBT' stands for? It stands for 'Debate On Understanding Bewildersome Thoughts.'

I never quite know if what I do will be understood.

I grew so depressed from the lack of support that I considered quitting. No one understood me.

Unless I'm really uneasy with what I'm writing, I lose interest very quickly.

For most of my writing life, I've refused to allow myself to believe that writing was a significant form of action. I always felt very uneasy about the fact that all I did was write in a situation as desperate as apartheid South Africa. Whether I was correct or not is a different issue.

I can't explain something I saw on holiday on Holy Island when I was about nine years old, but do you know what, it could have been my PE teacher dressed in a monk's habit. I have no idea. I'm not a ghost person... it doesn't mean there aren't unexplained things; I just don't think they're ghosts.

It is unfair to believe everything we hear about lawyers, some of it might not be true.

How could God allow cancer, poverty, the sheer unfairness of so many lives?

I believe that women know if their husbands are unfaithful. They feel it.

I believe a lot of what contributes to the sadness and downward-spiraling in our lives is a sense of hopelessness. We become resentful when circumstances aren't unfolding as we want, leading us to doubt whether we will ever get what we want.

I wish what I do was all real. Some of it's real, some of it's an illusion and I try to blur the line between both, but unfortunately I've got to be honest with you. Taking a $1 bill and turning it into a $100 - unfortunately it's not real.