I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me.

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

I apply the Abraham Lincoln test for moral casuistry: 'If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.' Well, then, if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.

How ya doin'?' I always think, What kind of a question is that?, and I always reply, 'A bit early to tell.

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.

It’s considered perfectly normal in this society to approach dying people who you don’t know but who are unbelievers and say, ‘Now are you gonna change your mind?’ That is considered almost a polite question.

If religious instruction were not allowed until the child had attained the age of reason, we would be living in a quite different world.