I've always assumed that every time a child is born, the Divine reenters the world. Okay? That's the meaning of the Christmas story. And every time that child's purity is corrupted by society, that's the meaning of the Crucifixion story. Your man Jesus stands for that child, that pure spirit, and as its surrogate, he's being born and put to death again and again, over and over, every time we inhale and exhale, not just at the vernal equinox and on the twenty-fifth of December.

This may be said for the last quarter of the twentieth century: the truism that if we want a better world we will have to be better people came to be acknowledge, if not thoroughly understood, by a significantly large minority.

Christians, and some Jews, claim we're in the "end times," but they've been saying this off and on for more than two thousand years.

Eating a raw oyster is like french kissing a mermaid.

Like the Arthurian years at Camelot, the Sixties constituted a breakthrough, a fleeting moment of glory, a time when a significant little chunk of humanity briefly realised its moral potential and flirted with its neurological destiny, a collective spiritual awakening that flared brilliantly until the barbaric and mediocre impulses of the species drew tight once more the curtains of darkness.

If you want to make a name for yourself, the oldest trick in the book is to attack what everybody else reveres.

But do we know how to make love stay?' I can't even think about it. The best I can do is play it day by day.