I never wavered in my certainty that God did not exist. I was simply liberated by the thought that there might be a way to engage with religion without having to subscribe to its supernatural content - a way, to put it in more abstract terms, to think about Fathers without upsetting my respectful memory of my own father. I recognized that my continuing resistance to theories of an afterlife or of heavenly residents was no justification for giving up on the music, buildings, prayers, rituals, feasts, shrines, pilgrimages, communal meals and illustrated manuscripts of the faiths.

To look at the paper is to raise a seashell to one's ear and to be overwhelmed by the roar of humanity.

The only way to be happy is to realise how much depends on how you look at things

Let's say you went to Harvard or Oxford or Cambridge, and you said, 'I've come here because I'm in search of morality, guidance and consolation; I want to know how to live,' - they would show you the way to the insane asylum.

It is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things.

A notorious inability to express emotions makes human beings the only animals capable of suicide.

I went to church and couldn't swallow it. The music was nice but I don't belong there.