MT [Mother Teresa] was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction.

A celebrity is well known for being well known. I'm relatively well known - but for what I've written and said, or so I fondly imagine.

Terrorism is the tactic of demanding the impossible, and demanding it at gunpoint.

It's not at all good when your cancer is 'palpable' from the outside. Especially when, as at this stage, they didn't even know where the primary source was. Carcinoma works cunningly from the inside out. Detection and treatment often work more slowly and gropingly, from the outside in.

Never ask while you are doing it if what you are doing is fun. Don't introduce even your most reliably witty acquaintance as someone who will set the table on a roar.

For me, the life of the angler is an almost flawless example of how not to have a good time.

Human beings are pattern-seeking animals who will prefer even a bad theory or a conspiracy theory to no theory at all.