Chemotherapy isn't good for you.
I love it when Muslims go to war with each other, as I do when the Christians do, because it shows there's no such thing as the Christian world and the Islamic world. That's all crap.
I have nowhere claimed nor even implied that unbelief is a guarantee of good conduct or even an indicator of it.
There's been some research in cognitive science, I'm told, that discloses that there have always been perhaps 10 to 15 percent of people who are, as Pascal puts it, so made that they cannot believe. To us, when people talk about faith, it's white noise.
When you hear people demanding that the Ten Commandments be displayed in courtrooms and schoolrooms, always be sure to ask which set. It works every time.
Owners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they will think you are God. Whereas owners of cats are compelled to realize that, if you provide them with food and water and affection, they draw the conclusion that they are God.
I have tried for much of my life to write as if I was composing my sentences to be read posthumously.
Religion is compulsory in English schools, you know.
I learned that very often the most intolerant and narrow-minded people are the ones who congratulate themselves on their tolerance and open-mindedness.
Lovers often invest their first meetings with retrospective significance, as if to try to conjure the elements of the numinous out of the stubborn witness of the everyday.
A lot of people, because of my contempt for the false consolations of religion, think of me as a symbolic public opponent of that in extremis. And sometimes that makes me feel a bit alarmed, to be the repository of other people's hope.
I've proved to be as difficult to convert as I am to hypnotize.
Religion is part of the human make-up. It's also part of our cultural and intellectual history. Religion was our first attempt at literature, the texts, our first attempt at cosmology, making sense of where we are in the universe, our first attempt at health care, believing in faith healing, our first attempt at philosophy.
I've been to Uganda and to North Korea and to Eritrea, countless horror spots around the world.
I don't consider myself to be that credulous.
You know, you can make a small mistake in language or etiquette in Britain, or you could when I was younger, and really be made to feel it, and it's the flick of a lash, but it would sting, and especially at school where there's not much privacy, and so on. You could, yes, undoubtedly be made to feel crushed.
I feel upsettingly de-natured. If Penelope Cruz were one of my nurses, I wouldn't even notice.
The citizens of Tumortown are forever assailed with cures and rumors of cures.
I'm not particularly a feminist, but if you get women off the animal cycle of reproduction and give them some say in how many children they'll have, immediately the floor will rise.
My favorite time in the cycles of public life is the time when the Pope is dead and they haven't elected a new one. There's no one in the world who is infallible for those weeks. And you know, I don't miss it.
