The past was a dream wasn't it? And who ever remembers dreams?
Theology, however implausible many of its truth claims, is one of the most ambitious theoretical arenas left in an increasingly specialized world
Those who sentimentally indulge humanity do it no favours.
What's wrong with a bit of nostalgia between friends? I think nostalgia sometimes gets too much of a bad press.
You've got to have a sense of different audiences. I'm a kind of performer manque - I come from a long line of failed actors!
Reading is not a straightforward linear movement, a merely cumulative affair: our initial speculations generate a frame of reference within which to interpret what comes next, but what comes next may retrospectively transform our original understanding, highlighting some features of it and backgrounding others.
Dawkins considers that all faith is blind faith, and that Christian and Muslim children are brought up to believe unquestioningly. Not even the dim-witted clerics who knocked me about at grammar school thought that.
Labour to grow better under all your afflictions, lest your afflictions grow worse, lest God mingle them with more darkness, bitterness and terror.
Everybody certainly has the right to defend themselves. That's not to say that they should defy common sense by avoiding or diffusing confrontation. And that's very, very important.
Compulsive eating is only the symptom; believing that you are not worth your own love is the problem. Go for the love. You will never be sorry.
As a writer one is allowed to have conversations with oneself. What is considered sane in writers is made for the rest of the human race.