Urging humans to be superhumans, on pain of death and torture, is the urging of terrible self-abasement at their repeated and inevitable failure to keep the rules.

In a Pyongyang restaurant, don't ever ask for a doggie bag.

Not many people come through esophageal cancer and live to talk about it, or not for long.

When I abandoned the smoking habit of more than three decades I was given a supposedly helpful pill called Wellbutrin. But as soon as I discovered that this was the brand name for an antidepressant, I tossed the bottle away. There may be successful methods for overcoming the blues but for me they cannot include a capsule that says: 'Fool yourself into happiness, while pretending not to do so.' I should actually want my mind to be strong enough to circumvent such a trick.

The noble title of "dissident" must be earned rather than claimed; it connotes sacrifice and risk rather than mere disagreement.

Suppose there were groups of secularists at hospitals who went round the terminally ill and urged them to adopt atheism: 'Don't be a mug all your life. Make your last days the best ones. People might suppose this was in poor taste.

I think the cultural task is to separate our impulses and needs and desires from the supernatural and, above all, from the superstitious.