I'd always somehow felt slightly as if I'd been born in the wrong country.

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.

The diet book is one of those fool-and-money separation devices that seems, like roulette or slot machines, never to lose its power.

My chief consolation in this year of living dyingly has been the presence of friends.

Hardest of all, as one becomes older, is to accept that sapient remarks can be drawn from the most unwelcome or seemingly improbable sources, and that the apparently more trustworthy sources can lead one astray.

Forgotten were the elementary rules of logic, that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and that what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.

If waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.