“As far as God and Church and Religion and the Buddy Rosses and that sort of thing, I kind of always felt that organized religion was just basically a theological insurance scam where they’re saying, ‘If you spend time with us, guess what? You’re going to live forever. You’re going to go to some other plane where you’re going to be so happy, you’ll just be happy all the time,’ which is also kind of a scary idea to me…”

“If you say, ‘Well, okay, I don’t believe in God, there’s no evidence of God,’ then you’re missing the stars in the sky and you’re missing the sunrises and sunsets and you’re missing the fact that bees pollinate all these crops and keep us alive and the way that everything seems to work together at the same time. Everything is sort of built in a way that, to me, suggests intelligent design. But at the same time, there’s a lot of things in life where you say to yourself, ‘Well, if this is God’s plan, it’s very peculiar.’ And you have to wonder about That Guy’s personality, the Big Guy’s personality.”

– Stephen King, speaking to NPR’s Terry Gross about his novel, Joyland. May 29, 2013