The discovery there is no god is a great relief, because if there were, it would be like living in a celestial North Korea if there was one. You would never be able to escape.

Time spent arguing with the faithful is, oddly enough, almost never wasted.

It ought to be an offense to be excruciating and unfunny in circumstances where your audience is almost morally obliged to enthuse.

Religion has been an enormous multiplier of tribal suspicion and hatred.

To remember friendship is to recall those conversations that it seemed a sin to break off

It [defending Salmon Rushdie] was, if I can phrase it like this, a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved. In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humor, the individual and the defense of free expression.

Well, I'll put it this way: you can certainly say belief in God makes people behave worse. That can be proved beyond a doubt.