I was taught that the human brain was the crowning glory of evolution so far, but I think it's a very poor scheme for survival.

Because we grew up surrounded by big dramatic story arcs in books and movies, we think our lives are supposed to be filled with huge ups and downs. So people pretend there is drama where there is none.

The German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, who had syphilis, said that only a person of deep faith could afford the luxury of religious skepticism. Humanists, by and large educated, comfortably middle-class persons with rewarding lives like mine, find rapture enough in secular knowledge and hope. Most people can't.

You are reading a bold and universal headline which says ,’I am here, I am here, I am here.

I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around. Lucky me, lucky mud.

His mother understood my illness immediately, that it was my world rather than myself that was diseased.

I learned how to make jokes because I wanted to give people as much fun as they did, and I guess I did, too.