I took about a year to fully adjust. Like there's a death at the family or a divorce, you don't just snap your fingers and it's over.

If the Prodigal Son's a parable, and if Adam and Eve are metaphors, then maybe God is just figure of speech.

The very concept of sin comes from the Bible. Christianity offers to solve a problem of its own making! Would you be thankful to a person who cut you with a knife in order to sell you a bandage?

I am an atheist because there is no evidence for the existence of God. That should be all that needs to be said about it: no evidence, no belief.

Insanity is believing your hallucinations are real. Religion is believing that other peoples' hallucinations are real.

All you have to do is walk into any children's hospital and you know there is no God. Prayer doesn't make any difference. Those people pray for their beloved children to live and they die.

People are always asking, "What's the purpose of life?" That's easy. Relieve suffering. Create beauty. Make gardens.

If the answers to prayer are merely what God wills all along, then why pray?

I'm proud to be an atheist - it helps me stand for so much more and fall for so much less.

Faith is a cop-out. If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits. It is intellectual bankruptcy.

How happy can you be when you think every action and thought is being monitored by a judgmental ghost ?

The creatures that inhabit this earth--be they human beings or animals--are here to contribute, each in its own particular way, to the beauty and prosperity of the world.

Intellectuals always make a fuss about nothing.

I write books, I write for comic books, I give lectures... I live. And when the opportunity comes to do a picture, I do a picture.

I realized that I was writing about folks with lots of skills, especially fix-it skills and survival skills, who were nonetheless not doing well in the new-millennium America.

I always assumed that at some point I would have to quit making jokes, get a real job and do something meaningful and productive that would actually benefit society. Fortunately this never happened.

Ye werena the first lass I kissed," he said softly. "But I swear you'll be the last.

Neither man nor nation can exist without a sublime idea.

Each ten years of a man's life has its own fortunes, its own hopes, its own desires.

I started running track when I was 13 years old, as a freshman in high school. I ran the 400 meters, which is a very tough race and a full sprint.

People might look great on the outside but they all have something that they're dealing with.