The finest fury is the most controlled.

It's no fun to appreciate to the full the truth of the materialist proposition that I don't have a body, I am a body.

Since I speak and write about this a good deal, I am often asked at public meetings, in what sometimes seems to me a rather prurient way, whether I myself or my family have 'ever been threatened' by jihadists. My answer is that yes, I have, and so has everyone else in the audience, if they have paid enough attention to the relevant bin-Ladenist broadcasts to notice the fact.

It's normally agreed that the question 'How are you?' doesn't put you on your oath to give a full or honest answer.

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.

There are all kinds of stupid people that annoy me but what annoys me most is a lazy argument.

In the grip of a neurological disorder, I am fast losing control of words even as my relationship with the world has been reduced to them.