The thunder of false modesty was deafening.

They're so attached to their patterns that they've forgotten rule number one of human behavior: there are no patterns. People just do things. There's no such things as a coherent and fully integrated human personality, let alone consistent motivation.

I know. I was there. I saw the great void in your soul, and you saw mine.

We all operate on different levels of awareness. Half the time I don't know what I'm doing.

My own diagnosis of my problem is a simpler one. It's that I share 50 per cent of my genome with a banana and 98 per cent with a chimpanzee. Banana's don't do psychological consistency. And the tiny part of us that's different - the special Homo sapiens bit - is faulty. It doesn't work. Sorry about that.

The nicest characters in A Week in December research are, in fact, Muslims - and their religious devotion is one of the things that defines them.

I suppose that each of us may have a great moment in our life, a month, a week a year, when we are most fully what we are meant to be