I'm not afraid of being dead, that's to say there's nothing to be afraid of. I won't know I'm dead, would be my strong conviction. And if I find that I'm alive in any way at all, that'll be a pleasant surprise. I quite like surprises.

Reagan is doing to the country what he can no longer do to his wife.

What word or expression do you most overuse? Re-reading a collection of my stuff, I was rather startled to find that it was 'perhaps.

Here’s someone who says there’s no such thing, it’s all intelligent design. How sure am I of my own views? Don’t take refuge in the false security of consensus, and the feeling that whatever you think you’re bound to be okay, because you’re in the safely moral majority.

The easiest way to establish a dictatorship is to claim you are God's representative on earth.

I could be spending time looking through a telescope or into a microscope and finding out the most extraordinary, wonderful things, but people say faith can move mountains. Faith in what, by the way? You haven't said.

Who are your favourite heroines in real life? The women of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran who risk their lives and their beauty to defy the foulness of theocracy. Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Azar Nafisi as their ideal feminine model.