I can't think of anything I hate more than a former punk - they are the most self-righteous people in the world.

I hate that tabloid idea of anybody who is famous having to forfeit their privacy.

I cannot understand antiabortion arguments that center on the sanctity of life. As a species, we’ve fairly comprehensively demonstrated that we don’t believe in the sanctity of life. The shrugging acceptance of war, famine, epidemic, pain, and lifelong, grinding poverty show us that, whatever we tell ourselves, we’ve made only the most feeble of efforts to really treat human life as sacred.

I've got more friends than I've ever had in my life at the age of 39 - although given that I didn't have any friends until the age of 27, it doesn't say much - because I found the internet.

A library in the middle of a community is a cross between an emergency exit, a life raft and a festival. They are cathedrals of the mind; hospitals of the soul; theme parks of the imagination. On a cold, rainy island, they are the only sheltered public spaces where you are not a consumer, but a citizen, instead.

Feminism has had exactly the same problem that "political correctness" has had: people keep using the phrase without really knowing what it means.

As far as I'm concerned, you're a feminist by default if you're born in the Western world right now.