Books don’t repeat the same words over and over. The Gulliver’s Travels whose whimsey amused you at twelve is not the Gulliver’s Travels whose acid engaged you at thirty.

Manichean dualism is the single worst idea people ever came up with – this notion that you can divide humankind into the children of light and the children of darkness.

Ockham’s disposable razors.

The next time somebody announces that he plans to get Medieval on your ass, tell him you’re going to get Renaissance on his gonads.

The odor of bowel wind is known to every human, but the fragrance of book glue has crossed only a fraction of mortal nostrils. And yet it behooves us not to judge the unlettered too harshly. We must stay the impulse to write CHUCKLEHEAD above their doors and carve DOLT upon their tombstones.

There was an otherworldly quality about him, the aura of one privy to secret communiques in forgotten languages.

We need to keep domesticating religion. It’s such an unpredictable beast.

I wanted a real diary, but there wasn't time to visit a stationery store, so instead I ran down to Thrift Drug and got you. According to your cover, you're an 'Official Popeye the Sailor Spiral-Bound Notebook, copyright © 1959 King Features Syndicate.' When I look into your wizened face, Popeye, I know you're a man I can trust.

If there is a god, I think he has a sense of humour. He does not require human beings to protect him from satire.

Manichean dualism is the single worst idea people ever came up with — this notion that you can divide humankind into the children of light and the children of darkness.