You can't imagine how gratifying it is to have a reader come up to you and say, 'You changed my life.'

The argument from improbability, properly deployed, comes close to proving that God does not exist.

Real life seeks the gentle slopes at the back of Mount Improbable, while creationists are blind to all but the daunting precipice at the front.

I think what attracts me about the Electric Monk is that it's such an eloquent example of the futility of belief for belief's sake. I mean there's only any point in believing something if it's true.

It is a remarkable coincidence that almost everyone has the same religion as their parents and it always just so happens they're the right religion.

By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out. -this quote is actually found in Carl Sagan's book The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, where he attributes it to engineer James Oberg, who says he stole it from someone else.

As my colleague, the physical chemist Peter Atkins, puts it, we must be equally agnostic about the theory that there is a teapot in orbrit around the planet Pluto. We can't disprove it. But that doesn't mean the theory that there is a teapot is on level terms with the theory that there isn't.