To remember friendship is to recall those conversations that it seemed a sin to break off

Endless praise and adoration, limitless abnegation and abjection of self; a celestial North Korea.

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?

I used to wish there was a useful term for those of us who thought American power should be used to remove psychopathic dictators.

It's a better tradition for people who think for themselves and who don't pray in aid of any supernatural authority. That's what you should be spending your life is in spreading and deepening that tradition.

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

There are also people who say it's God's curse on me that I should have it near my throat because that was the organ of blasphemy which I used for so many years. I've used many other organs to blaspheme as well if it comes to that.