If your memory was OK you could descend upon on a bookshop – a big enough one so that the staff wouldn’t hassle a browser – and steal the contents of books by reading them. I drank down 1984 while loitering in the 'O' section of the giant Heffers store in Cambridge. When I was full I carried the slopping vessel of my attention carefully out of the shop.

We are supposed to be on the side of goodness in the sense that we need it, not that we are it.

When I'm tired and therefore indecisive, it can take half an hour to choose the book I am going to have with me while I brush my teeth.

If your memory was OK you could descend upon on a bookshop – a big enough one so that the staff wouldn’t hassle a browser – and steal the contents of books by reading them. I drank down 1984 while loitering in the 'O' section of the giant Heffers store in Cambridge. When I was full I carried the slopping vessel of my attention carefully out of the shop.

The emotions that sustain religious belief are all, in fact, deeply ordinary and deeply recognisable to anybody who has ever made their way across the common ground of human experience as an adult.

God doesn't want your careful virtue, He wants your reckless generosity.

Emotions can certainly be misleading: they can fool you into believing stuff that is definitely, demonstrably untrue.