I mean, what would I be doing if I couldn't write? But that fortunately hasn't proved to be the case and I can read any day. I still read a lot, and I can write any day, but much more slowly and fewer words.

I could be spending time looking through a telescope or into a microscope and finding out the most extraordinary, wonderful things, but people say faith can move mountains. Faith in what, by the way? You haven't said.

Religion makes intelligent people say and do wacky things, believe and affirm crazy things.

Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that's where it should stay.

Friends call me Hitch. Maybe it can be turned into a 900-phone number. People would pay to talk to me.

All this could be part of a plan. There is no way an atheist can prove it’s not. But it’s some plan, isn't it? With mass destruction, pitiless extermination, annihilation going on all the time. And all of this set in motion on a scale that’s absolutely beyond our imagination, in order that the pope can tell people not to jerk off.

it is interesting to find that people of faith now seek defensively to say that they are no worse than fascists or Nazis or Stalinists