It's surprising to me how many of my friends send Christmas cards, or holiday cards, including my atheist and secular friends.

If you look at any Muslim society and you make a scale of how developed they are, and how successful the economy is, it's a straight line. It depends on how much they emancipate their women.

In a Pyongyang restaurant, don't ever ask for a doggie bag.

Religion is part of the human make-up. It's also part of our cultural and intellectual history. Religion was our first attempt at literature, the texts, our first attempt at cosmology, making sense of where we are in the universe, our first attempt at health care, believing in faith healing, our first attempt at philosophy.

I'm here as a product of process of evolution, which doesn't make very many exceptions. And which rates life relatively cheaply.

I'm very happy by myself - I'm lucky in that way - if I've got enough to read and something to write about and a bit of alcohol for me to add an edge, not to dull it.

The Postmodernists' tyranny wears people down by boredom and semi-literate prose.