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

No school of philosophy has ever solved this question of whether being determines consciousness or the other way around. It may be a false antithesis.

To reflect upon the event horizon is a great deal more awe-inspiring than a burning bush or a wooden statue that weeps or pees or bleeds.

A rule of thumb with humor; if you worry that you might be going too far, you have already not gone far enough. If everybody laughs, you have failed.

Not since North Korean media declared Kim Jong-il to be the reincarnation of Kim Il Sung has there been such a blatant attempt to create a necrocracy, or perhaps mausolocracy, in which a living claimant assumes the fleshly mantle of the departed.

A celebrity is well known for being well known. I'm relatively well known - but for what I've written and said, or so I fondly imagine.

Cluster bombs are perhaps not good in themselves, but when they are dropped on identifiable concentrations of Taliban troops, they do have a heartening effect.