"To be honest, I'm thinking much more about science than about religion when I'm writing. To me, art itself is a religion and the challenge to it is not religion, it's the hardcore materialism of science. So I spend quite a bit of time trying to make sense of how I seem to have a soul, I have this ghostly consciousness, yet I know as a believer in science that this is just coming from carbon, hydrogen and oxygen molecules. I think if you take science seriously there are a lot of interesting questions to ask. I would be happy if more novelists, not just science fiction writers, paid attention to that." — Freedom author Jonathan Franzen, quoted in the Telegraph