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.

Religion is not the belief there is a god. Religion is the belief god tells you what to do.

I think I write in a fairly self-confident manner.

North Korea is a necrocracy, or a mauselocracy or a thanatocracy in which the one [Kim Il-sung] is diffused into being with the other [Kim Jong Il], and where both of them are said to have had miraculous births attended by miraculous phenomena such as, for example, birds singing in Korean, when they were born.

No society has gone the way of gulags or concentration camps by following the path of Spinoza and Einstein and Jefferson and Thomas Paine

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

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