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.

The museums of medieval Europe, from Holland to Tuscany, are crammed with instruments and devices upon which the holy men labored devoutly, in order to see how long they could keep someone alive while being roasted. It is not needful to go into further details, but there were also religious books of instruction in this art, and guides for the detection of heresy by pain.

I was precocious enough to watch the news and read the papers, and I can remember October 1956, the simultaneous crisis in Hungary and Suez, very well. And getting a sense that the world was dangerous, a sense that the game was up, that the Empire was over.

I've noticed that the more flooding there is, the more bullshit gets talked. I mean it was very noticeable in the Asian tsumai. It happened around Christmas-New Year. The Muslims of Sri Lanka said 'We knew this would happen because the Christians were using alcohol for their Christmas celebrations.' The Buddhists said 'We knew this would happen because of the horrible Muslim slaughter practices.' It's amazing to see how apocalypse or catastrophe makes people behave primitively.

It's no fun to appreciate to the full the truth of the materialist proposition that I don't have a body, I am a body.

It's amazing how relaxing it is not to claim you know more than you do. I'm surprised that those who claim to speak in the name of god don't take more advantage of this relief.

Your ideal authors ought to pull you from the foundering of your previous existence, not smilingly guide you into a friendly and peaceable harbor.