I have quite a decent constitution in spite of all my abuse of it and my advanced years. I'm still quite robust.

Judaism is not just one more religion, but in its way the root of religious evil

There's a big difference, as I'm sure you know, it's a slightly manneristic one, between people of the '60s and people of '68. Being a soixante-huitard - it's so nice to have a French word for it - is very different from just having happened to been a baby boomer in the '60s.

Very often the test of one's allegiance to a cause or to a people is precisely the willingness to stay the course when things are boring, to run the risk of repeating an old argument just one more time, or of going one more round with a hostile or (much worse) indifferent audience.

Religion, it is true, still possesses the huge if cumbersome and unwieldy advantage of having come first.

The mildest criticism of religion is also the most radical and the most devastating one. Religion is man-made.

When you fall ill, people send you CDs. Very often, in my experience, these are by Leonard Cohen