The Specters feast as vampires feast on blood, but the Specters’ food is attention. A conscious and informed interest in the world. The immaturity of children is less attractive to them.

Everything has a meaning, if only we could read it.

I look at the state of the American politics and I scratch my head in wonder. How can the Republican Party, any party, have fallen into to such a state of self-destructiveness - self-destructive stupidity? How is it possible? I don't know. It's an absolute mystery to me.

For a long time I thought I was a poet, but that's a high title to claim.

I thought physics could be done to the glory of God, till I saw there wasn’t any God at all and that physics was more interesting anyway. The Christian religion is a very powerful and convincing mistake, that’s all.

I seemed to have spent the whole time either reading, which I loved, or laughing, which I love, or fooling about, which I loved. There was the usual teenage angst: "Nobody understands me" and "I'm the only genius in the world" and all that stuff. But that didn't get very deep.

If we all gave all our goods to the poor, the church would fall apart. If we all hated our father and mother, as Jesus told us to, there'd be an end of the church's emphasis on the family as being the one important thing holding the whole society together. There are all sorts of ways in which the church's teachings contradict directly what Jesus says in the Gospel.