when a person implores you to be reasonable what he means is that you should speed round forthwith to his point of view.

Our only hope rests on the off-chance that God does exist.

Optimism is the last resort of those in deep despair. There can't be any optimists in heaven.

Adolescence is usually typified by an unanswerable combination of innocence and insolence.

I think the meaning of the universe is bound up with the egg. ... I am fed up with the meaning of the universe. Everything starts in the egg and ends in death. I think it's called 'the heartbreak at the heart of things.' But then perhaps our very mortality is an egg and at the moment of death our souls will emerge like damp chicks.

I have frequently thought that the dead should be buried with all their belongings. It seems weirdly perverse that their clothes should still be here when the people you love best in the world have gone.

I have never had much trouble simultaneously entertaining diametrically opposed propositions, and welcome the possibility that this is not because I have one mind and am out of it, but because I have lots of them, all beavering away on their own.