I didn't think Marilyn Monroe was beautiful. It used to worry me. I thought maybe I'm not put together like the other chaps.

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.

Islam in its origins is just as shady and approximate as those from which it took its borrowings. It makes immense claims for itself, invokes prostrate submission or "surrender" as a maxim to its adherents, and demands deference and respect from nonbelievers into the bargain. There is nothing-absolutely nothing-in its teachings that can even begin to justify such arrogance and presumption.

I'm terrified of losing my voice.

Those of us who are most genuinely repelled by war and violence are also those who are most likely to decide that some things, after all, are worth fighting for.

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?

Everything about Christianity is contained in the pathetic image of 'the flock.