To imagine that God wants prayers and hymns of praise is to make him out to a sort of oriental potentate; while praying for favours is an attempt to get him to change his allegedly all-wise mind.

As for the accusation of intellectual pride, surely the boot is on the other foot. Atheists don't claim to know anything with certainty -- it's the believers who know it all.

Why am I an atheist? The short answer is that I cannot accept any of the alternatives. I simply don't find them believable.

As for an eternity in heaven - that would be hell!

To imagine that "God moves in mysterious ways" is to put up a smokescreen of mystery behind which fantasy may survive in spite of all the facts.

This rose of pearl-coated infinity transformsthe diseased slums of a broken heartinto a palace made of psalms and gold.

Life is very simple, but to make ourselves feel intelligent, we insist on making it complex.

I like to feel dumb. That’s how I know there’s more in the world than me.

People often become actresses because of something they dislike about themselves: They pretend they are someone else.

It could end up like the Dog & Duck against the Red Lion.

We inherit plots. There are only two or three in the world, five or six at most. We ride them like treadmills.

I used to think marriage was a plate-glass window just begging for a brick.

All that lives is striving for happiness; yet a thousand and one pains and fears attend upon every pleasure which man seeks through the ignorance of exclusiveness.

At 16, I dropped out of school and spent five years working as a bicycle mechanic and volunteering in a Trauma Centre before ultimately deciding to go to university.

We don't mind that we still have troops in Germany, or that we still have troops in Japan or Korea. But they are not in danger, and we know that they are in danger in Iraq.