You can be a Polish American, or an Arab American, or a Greek American but you can't be English American. Why not?

In the brute physical world, and the one encompassed by medicine, there are all too many things that could kill you, don't kill you, and then leave you considerably weaker.

All of life is a wager

When you fall ill, people send you CDs. Very often, in my experience, these are by Leonard Cohen

I learned that to be amusing was not to be frivolous and that language - always the language - was the magic key as much to prose as to poetry.

North Korea is a necrocracy, or a mauselocracy or a thanatocracy in which the one [Kim Il-sung] is diffused into being with the other [Kim Jong Il], and where both of them are said to have had miraculous births attended by miraculous phenomena such as, for example, birds singing in Korean, when they were born.

I'm a member of no party. I have no ideology. I'm a rationalist. I do what I can in the international struggle between science and reason and the barbarism, superstition and stupidity that's all around us.