It ought to be an offense to be excruciating and unfunny in circumstances where your audience is almost morally obliged to enthuse.

Mockery of religion is one of the most essential things... one of the beginnings of human emancipation is the ability to laugh at authority.

I make preparations both to live and to die every day, but with the emphasis on not dying, and on acting as if I was going to carry on living.

I think that there is no supernatural dimension. The natural world is quite wonderful enough. The more we know about it, the much more wonderful it is than any supernatural proposition.

Endless praise and adoration, limitless abnegation and abjection of self; a celestial North Korea.

The suicide-bombing community is not absolutely 100 percent religious, but it is pretty nearly 100 percent religious.

Talking, it seemed to me, was the point of adult existence.