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 took part in what was actually the last eruption of Marxist internationalism.

If I'm in a political argument, I think I can, with reasonable accuracy and without boasting, put the other person's side of the case at least as well as they could. One has to be able to say that in any well-conducted argument.

I'm crepuscular.

When you hear people demanding that the Ten Commandments be displayed in courtrooms and schoolrooms, always be sure to ask which set. It works every time.

My children, to the extent that they have found religion, have found it from me, in that I insist on at least a modicum of religious education for them.

The violence in the Bible is appalling.

I didn't think Marilyn Monroe was beautiful. It used to worry me. I thought maybe I'm not put together like the other chaps.

I felt Clinton represented the worst of the 1960s.

I retain what's interesting to me, but I don't have a lot of strategic depth.

'WASP' is the only ethnic term that is in fact a term of class, apart from redneck, which is another word for the same group but who are in the lower social strata, so it's inexplicably tied up with social standing and culture and history in a way that the other hyphenations just are not.

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.

Pakistan has to export a lot of uneducated people, many of whom have become infected with the most barbaric reactionary ideas.

I don't have any terrific self-esteem issues but I do sometimes realise I've been too lucky and that I'm over-praised. It makes me nervous. I have this sense of being overrated.

When we talk about mortality, we are talking about our children.

My favorite time in the cycles of public life is the time when the Pope is dead and they haven't elected a new one. There's no one in the world who is infallible for those weeks. And you know, I don't miss it.

There are people who cannot forget, as neither do I, the lesson of the years of the Indochina War. Which was, first, that the state is capable of being a murderer. A mass murderer, and a conspirator and a liar.

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.

I don't think the war in Afghanistan was ruthlessly enough waged.

It's surprising to me how many of my friends send Christmas cards, or holiday cards, including my atheist and secular friends.

No school of philosophy has ever solved this question of whether being determines consciousness or the other way around. It may be a false antithesis.

You can only have one aim per debate.

Beautiful sentences pop into my head. Beautiful sentences that aren't always absolutely accurate. Then, I have to choose between the beautiful sentence and being absolutely accurate. It can be a difficult choice.

And when I was young, my family was perfectly nice. I write a lot about it, as you noticed. But it was rather limited. I think, I don't think anyone in my family would really feel I'd done them an injustice by saying that. We didn't see many people. There were many books. It was as if I wanted to get away from home.

Well look, I mean, I think that prayer and holy water, and things like that are all fine. They don't do any good, but they don't necessarily do any harm. It's touching to be thought of in that way. It makes up for those who tell me that I've got my just desserts.

I joined a small but growing post-Trotskyite Luxembourgist sect.

I wanted to write.

Of course, I do everything for money.

I have nowhere claimed nor even implied that unbelief is a guarantee of good conduct or even an indicator of it.

I'd always somehow felt slightly as if I'd been born in the wrong country.

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.

If you can talk, you can write.

I'm terrified of losing my voice.

I still make sure to go, at least once every year, to a country where things cannot be taken for granted, and where there is either too much law and order or too little.

I became a journalist because one didn't have to specialise.

Not many people come through esophageal cancer and live to talk about it, or not for long.

I don't think souls or bodies can be changed by incantation. Or anything else by the way.

Cancer victimhood contains a permanent temptation to be self-centred and even solipsistic.

Well, I'll put it this way: you can certainly say belief in God makes people behave worse. That can be proved beyond a doubt.

My dear wife has, I would say, probably never opened a religious book, and seems to be one of those people to whom the whole idea is utterly remote and absurd.

The Koran shows every sign of being thrown together by human beings, as do all the other holy books.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

I don't consider myself to be that credulous.

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

Chemotherapy isn't good for you.

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