Knowing that we are primates, I think, is a fascinating discovery, and a very interesting and rather cheering one.

There is almost no country in Africa where it is not essential to know to which tribe, or which subgroup of which tribe, the president belongs. From this single piece of information you can trace the lines of patronage and allegiance that define the state.

Why do humans exist? A major part of the answer: because Pikaia Gracilens survived the Burgess decimation.

To be the father of growing daughters is to understand something of what Yeats evokes with his imperishable phrase 'terrible beauty.' Nothing can make one so happily exhilarated or so frightened: it's a solid lesson in the limitations of self to realize that your heart is running around inside someone else's body. It also makes me quite astonishingly calm at the thought of death: I know whom I would die to protect and I also understand that nobody but a lugubrious serf can possibly wish for a father who never goes away.

Morality comes from humanism and is stolen by religion for its own purposes.

In the grip of a neurological disorder, I am fast losing control of words even as my relationship with the world has been reduced to them.

It's much worse to see a woman drunk than a man: I don't know quite why this is true but it just is. Don't ever be responsible for it.