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.

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

I feel Anglo-American.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

To be in opposition is not to be a nihilist.

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.

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.

Obscenity comes from grime.

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

Religion is compulsory in English schools, you know.

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

Chemotherapy isn't good for you.

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

I don't consider myself to be that credulous.

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.

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

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

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.

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.