I felt Clinton represented the worst of the 1960s.

I don't have any terrific self-esteem issues but I do sometimes realise I've been too lucky and that I'm over-praised. It makes me nervous. I have this sense of being overrated.

Religion is poison because it asks us to give up our most precious faculty, which is that of reason, and to believe things without evidence. It then asks us to respect this, which it calls faith.

The true essence of a dictatorship is in fact not its regularity but its unpredictability and caprice; those who live under it must never be able to relax, must never be quite sure if they have followed the rules correctly or not.

I learned that to be amusing was not to be frivolous and that language - always the language - was the magic key as much to prose as to poetry.

By trying to adjust to the findings that it once tried so viciously to ban and repress, religion has only succeeded in restating the same questions that undermined it in earlier epochs. What kind of designer or creator is so wasteful and capricious and approximate? What kind of designer or creator is so cruel and indifferent? And - most of all - what kind of designer or creator only chooses to "reveal" himself to semi-stupefied peasants in desert regions?

I am a person of faith: I am a person who will believe practically anything on no evidence at all.