What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
— Christopher Hitchens
I've had some dark nights of the soul, of course, but giving in to depression would be a sellout, a defeat.
I think being an atheist is something you are, not something you do.
To terrify children with the image of hell... to consider women an inferior creation. Is that good for the world?
I have nowhere claimed nor even implied that unbelief is a guarantee of good conduct or even an indicator of it.
Of course, I do everything for money.
Trust is not the same as faith. A friend is someone you trust. Putting faith in anyone is a mistake.
I wanted to write.
I joined a small but growing post-Trotskyite Luxembourgist sect.
When I look back on what I did for the Left, I'm in a small way quite proud of some of it - I only wish I'd done more.
The concept of loneliness and exile and self-sufficiency continually bucks me up.
I'm not a conservative of any kind.
I have tried for much of my life to write as if I was composing my sentences to be read posthumously.
High moral character is not a precondition for great moral accomplishments.
My father had died, and very swiftly, too, of cancer of the esophagus. He was 79. I am 61. In whatever kind of a 'race' life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist.
It's not at all good when your cancer is 'palpable' from the outside. Especially when, as at this stage, they didn't even know where the primary source was. Carcinoma works cunningly from the inside out. Detection and treatment often work more slowly and gropingly, from the outside in.
I have quite a decent constitution in spite of all my abuse of it and my advanced years. I'm still quite robust.
Even with all the advantages of retrospect, and a lot of witnesses dead and gone, you can't make your life look as if you intended it or you were consistent. All you can show is how you dealt with various hands.
I'm terrified of losing my voice.
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.
Primate and elephant and even pig societies show considerable evidence of care for others, parent-child bonding, solidarity in the face of danger, and so on.
Even if I accepted that Jesus - like almost every other prophet on record - was born of a virgin, I cannot think that this proves the divinity of his father or the truth of his teachings. The same would be true if I accepted that he had been resurrected.
I think the materialist conception of history is valid.
For most of my life I let women do the driving and was happy to let them.
I worked out early on to give up things I couldn't do well at all.
I took part in what was actually the last eruption of Marxist internationalism.
I could not do what I do, and teach a class, and never miss a deadline, never be late for anything if I was a lush, OK? I would really love to read a piece that said, 'He is not a lush.' That would be fabulous, it would be a first, I could show it to people and say, 'Look!'
I vote and I do jury duty.
One of the great questions of philosophy is, do we innately have morality, or do we get it from celestial dictation? A study of the Ten Commandments is a very good way of getting into and resolving that issue.
The advice I've been giving to people all my life - that you may not be interested in the dialectic but the dialectic is interested in you; you can't give up politics, it won't give you up - was the advice I should have been taking myself.
I had real plans for my next decade and felt I'd worked hard enough to earn it. Will I really not live to see my children married? To watch the World Trade Center rise again? To read - if not indeed write - the obituaries of elderly villains like Henry Kissinger and Joseph Ratzinger?
I sometimes wish I were suffering in a good cause, or risking my life for the good of others, instead of just being a gravely endangered patient.
Religion is part of the human make-up. It's also part of our cultural and intellectual history. Religion was our first attempt at literature, the texts, our first attempt at cosmology, making sense of where we are in the universe, our first attempt at health care, believing in faith healing, our first attempt at philosophy.
I mean, what would I be doing if I couldn't write? But that fortunately hasn't proved to be the case and I can read any day. I still read a lot, and I can write any day, but much more slowly and fewer words.
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.
If you can talk, you can write.
I'd always somehow felt slightly as if I'd been born in the wrong country.
Ordinary morality is innate in my view.
The human wish to credit good things as miraculous and to charge bad things to another account is apparently universal.
I still think like a Marxist in many ways.
The amazing fact is that America is founded on a document. It's a work in progress. It can be tested by each generation.
It's impossible, I think, however much I'd become disillusioned politically or evolve into a post-political person, I don't think I'd ever change my view that socialism is the best political moment humans have ever come up with.
There's a big difference, as I'm sure you know, it's a slightly manneristic one, between people of the '60s and people of '68. Being a soixante-huitard - it's so nice to have a French word for it - is very different from just having happened to been a baby boomer in the '60s.
A gentleman is never rude except on purpose - I can honestly be nasty sober, believe you me.
A faction willing to take the risks of making war on the ossified status quo in the Middle East can be described as many things, but not as conservative.
I'm not that keen on the idea of being unconscious.
I was becoming post-ideological.
In one way, I suppose, I have been 'in denial' for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light.
I feel upsettingly de-natured. If Penelope Cruz were one of my nurses, I wouldn't even notice.
Well, I'm in my 60s now. I finally look it, I think. 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.
