I remember nothing of this, no ambulance rides, nothing. Nothing between switching out the bedside lamp and the sudden indignity of rebirth: the slaps, the brightness, the tubing, the speed, the urgent insistence that I be choked back into breathing life. I have felt so sorry for babies ever since.

The only people who are obsessed with food are anorexics and the morbidly obese. That, in erotic terms, is the Catholic church, in a nutshell.

People still don't get how astounding Darwinism is. People think what shocked everybody was that Charles Darwin seemed to be saying we had descended from apes.

I remember nothing of this, no ambulance rides, nothing. Nothing between switching out the bedside lamp and the sudden indignity of rebirth: the slaps, the brightness, the tubing, the speed, the urgent insistence that I be choked back into breathing life. I have felt so sorry for babies ever since.

Knowing what I now know I would never have done anything so fatuous; but then I never would have known what I know now had I not.

Money is to Everything as an Aeroplane is to Australia. The aeroplane isn't Australia, but it remains the only practical way we know of reaching it. So perhaps, metonymically, the aeroplane is Australia after all.

You don't sit down and write a wish list about the person you are going to fall violently in love with. It just doesn't work like that.