Masks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull.

As human knowledge has grown, it has also become plain that every religious story ever told about how we got here is quite simply wrong. This, finally, is what all religions have in common. They didn't get it right.

When a reader falls in love with a book, it leaves its essence inside him, like radioactive fallout in an arable field, and after that there are certain crops that will no longer grow in him, while other, stranger, more fantastic growths may occasionally be produced.

How do you defeat terrorism? Don’t be terrorized.

I do not envy people who think they have a complete explanation of the world, for the simple reason that they are obviously wrong.

And so it is they who, between them, give me all the reasons for believing in none.

Life is elsewhere. Cross frontiers. Fly away.