I have a list of titles that I leave at the [library] desk, because they are bound to be written some day, and it's best to be ahead of the queue.

You've got these twenty million people who call themselves the Evangelical Christians who will put their hand up and say, I believe in the devil, I'm against abortion and gay rights, and we have to blow up the world. It's frightening.

What is more humiliating than finding the object of your love unworthy?

Why is the measure of love loss?

You have to engage with people who are different from you and try to work with their thinking and their mind. That's a real challenge.

...to live differently, to love differently, to think differently, or to try to. Is the danger of beauty so great that it is better to live without it (the standard model)? Or to fall into her arms fire to fire? There is no discovery without risk and what you risk reveals what you value. Inside the horror of Nagasaki and Hiroshima lies the beauty of Einstein's E=MC squared

When I look at my life I realise that the mistakes I have made, the things I really regret, were not errors of judgement but failures of feeling.