The worst days are when you feel foggy in the head - chemo-brain they call it. It's awful because you feel boring. As well as bored. And stupid. And resigned.

Take the risk of thinking for yourself

I became a journalist partly so that I wouldn't ever have to rely on the press for my information.

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

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

Bertrand Russell used to employ the method of "evidence against interest"; in other words of deciding that a critique of capital punishment, say, carried more weight if it came from a prison governor. (My friend John O'Sullivan puts it like this: If the pope says he believes in God, he's only doing his job; if he says he doesn't believe in God, he may be on to something.)

My own view is that this planet is used as a penal colony, lunatic asylum and dumping ground by a superior civilisation, to get rid of the undesirable and unfit. I can't prove it, but you can't disprove it either.