We can't be as good as we'd want to, so the question then becomes, how do we cope with our own badness?

Sarcasm and compassion are two of the qualities that make life on Earth tolerable.

Books are, let's face it, better than everything else. If we played Cultural Fantasy Boxing League, and made books go fifteen rounds in the ring against the best that any other art form had to offer, then books would win pretty much every time.

One has so many more opinions about what has gone wrong than about what is perfect.

Love and charity share the same root word (caritas). How is that possible, when everything in our recent history suggest they cannot coexist, that they are antiethical, that if you put the two of them together in a sack they would bite and scratch and scream, until one of them is torn apart?

I'm still not a very good white wine, but I'm drinkable - you could put me in a punch, anyway.

The chief attraction of the opposite sex for all of us, old and young, men and women: we need someone to save us from the sympathetic smiles in the Sunday-night cinema queue, someone who can stop us from falling down into the pit where the permanently single live with their mums and dads.