The worst days are when you feel foggy in the head - chemo-brain they call it. It's awful because you feel boring. As well as bored. And stupid. And resigned.

I don't think the war in Afghanistan was ruthlessly enough waged.

It's surprising to me how many of my friends send Christmas cards, or holiday cards, including my atheist and secular friends.

No school of philosophy has ever solved this question of whether being determines consciousness or the other way around. It may be a false antithesis.

You can only have one aim per debate.

Beautiful sentences pop into my head. Beautiful sentences that aren't always absolutely accurate. Then, I have to choose between the beautiful sentence and being absolutely accurate. It can be a difficult choice.

And when I was young, my family was perfectly nice. I write a lot about it, as you noticed. But it was rather limited. I think, I don't think anyone in my family would really feel I'd done them an injustice by saying that. We didn't see many people. There were many books. It was as if I wanted to get away from home.

Well look, I mean, I think that prayer and holy water, and things like that are all fine. They don't do any good, but they don't necessarily do any harm. It's touching to be thought of in that way. It makes up for those who tell me that I've got my just desserts.

I joined a small but growing post-Trotskyite Luxembourgist sect.

I wanted to write.

Of course, I do everything for money.

I have nowhere claimed nor even implied that unbelief is a guarantee of good conduct or even an indicator of it.

I'd always somehow felt slightly as if I'd been born in the wrong country.

A lot of people, because of my contempt for the false consolations of religion, think of me as a symbolic public opponent of that in extremis. And sometimes that makes me feel a bit alarmed, to be the repository of other people's hope.

If you can talk, you can write.

I'm terrified of losing my voice.

I still make sure to go, at least once every year, to a country where things cannot be taken for granted, and where there is either too much law and order or too little.

I became a journalist because one didn't have to specialise.

Not many people come through esophageal cancer and live to talk about it, or not for long.

I don't think souls or bodies can be changed by incantation. Or anything else by the way.

Cancer victimhood contains a permanent temptation to be self-centred and even solipsistic.

Well, I'll put it this way: you can certainly say belief in God makes people behave worse. That can be proved beyond a doubt.

My dear wife has, I would say, probably never opened a religious book, and seems to be one of those people to whom the whole idea is utterly remote and absurd.

The Koran shows every sign of being thrown together by human beings, as do all the other holy books.

If you look at any Muslim society and you make a scale of how developed they are, and how successful the economy is, it's a straight line. It depends on how much they emancipate their women.

People until I was 60 would always say they thought I looked younger, which I think, without flattering myself, I did, but I think I certainly have, as George Orwell says people do after a certain age, the face they deserve.

For the people who ostensibly wish me well or are worried about my immortal soul, I say I take it kindly.

The penalty for getting mugged in an American city and losing your ID is that you can't fly home.

The press is still investing itself, it seems to me, in a sort of cynicism. It comes out better for them if they can predict hard times, bogging down, sniping, attrition.

I don't consider myself to be that credulous.

The people who tend to raise antiwar slogans will do so generally when it's American or British interests involved.

Chemotherapy isn't good for you.

I'm here as a product of process of evolution, which doesn't make very many exceptions. And which rates life relatively cheaply.

Religion is compulsory in English schools, you know.

It's true that obscenity is a matter of taste and in the eye of the beholder.

Obscenity comes from grime.

The secular argument, or the liberal argument, is to as much as possible remove taboos so things do not become unmentionable; to let some air into the discussion.

I don't think Romney is wacky at all, but religion makes intelligent people say and do wacky things, believe and affirm crazy things. Left on his own, Romney would never have said something like the Garden Of Eden was in Missouri, and will be again.

To be in opposition is not to be a nihilist.

I became a journalist partly so that I wouldn't ever have to rely on the press for my information.

George Bush made a mistake when he referred to the Saddam Hussein regime as 'evil.' Every liberal and leftist knows how to titter at such black-and-white moral absolutism.

The cause of my life has been to oppose superstition. It's a battle you can't hope to win - it's a battle that's going to go on forever. It's part of the human condition.

The great thing about the United States and the historically magnetic effect it has had on a lot of people like me is its generosity, to put it simply.

I make preparations both to live and to die every day, but with the emphasis on not dying, and on acting as if I was going to carry on living.

I think I write in a fairly self-confident manner.

I feel Anglo-American.

I don't think consensus-building politics is what I'm meant to be doing.

In the grip of a neurological disorder, I am fast losing control of words even as my relationship with the world has been reduced to them.

You can be a Polish American, or an Arab American, or a Greek American but you can't be English American. Why not?

I don't envy or much respect people who are completely politicised.