It's considered acceptable in our culture to approach perfect strangers, as often or not who may be in extremis, and evangelise. I don't see why that's considered a normal thing.

The penalty for getting mugged in an American city and losing your ID is that you can't fly home.

The Koran shows every sign of being thrown together by human beings, as do all the other holy books.

I had real plans for my next decade and felt I'd worked hard enough to earn it. Will I really not live to see my children married? To watch the World Trade Center rise again? To read - if not indeed write - the obituaries of elderly villains like Henry Kissinger and Joseph Ratzinger?

I don't think the soul is immortal, or at least not immortal in individuals, but it may be immortal as an aspect of the human personality because when I talk about what literature nourishes, it would be silly of me or reductionist to say that it nourishes the brain.

The finest fury is the most controlled.

I think everybody has had the experience at some point when they feel that there's more to life than just matter. But I think it's very important to keep that under control and not to hand it over to be exploited by priests and shamans and rabbis and other riffraff.