Ronald Reagan used to alarm his Soviet counterparts by saying that surely they'd both unite against an invasion from Mars.

Religion, it is true, still possesses the huge if cumbersome and unwieldy advantage of having come first.

I have tried for much of my life to write as if I was composing my sentences to be read posthumously.

She's got no charisma of any kind [but] I can imagine her being mildly useful to a low-rank porn director.

Faith is the surrender of the mind; it's the surrender of reason, it's the surrender of the only thing that makes us different from other mammals. It's our need to believe, and to surrender our skepticism and our reason, our yearning to discard that and put all our trust or faith in someone or something, that is the sinister thing to me. Of all the supposed virtues, faith must be the most overrated.

Religion is compulsory in English schools, you know.

When you consider how many millions of workdays begin with hangovers great and small, it is mildly ­surprising to find how few real descriptions of the experience our literature can boast.