My dear wife has, I would say, probably never opened a religious book, and seems to be one of those people to whom the whole idea is utterly remote and absurd.

Forgotten were the elementary rules of logic, that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and that what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.

Even with all the advantages of retrospect, and a lot of witnesses dead and gone, you can't make your life look as if you intended it or you were consistent. All you can show is how you dealt with various hands.

Chemotherapy isn't good for you. So when you feel bad, as I am feeling now, you think, 'Well that is a good thing because it's supposed to be poison. If it's making the tumor feel this queasy, then I'm OK with it.'

I wrote a piece from North Korea called Visit to a Small Planet which is a line I stole from a play of Gore Vidal's, because it did seem to me as if I had left this planet completely to go on this visit to the northern part of the Korean Peninsula, and it was as if coming back from another spatial body altogether.

The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism.

Never ask while you are doing it if what you are doing is fun. Don't introduce even your most reliably witty acquaintance as someone who will set the table on a roar.