Evil…doesn’t mean doing things that have bad consequences for people. It means private thoughts and actions that are not to “the Christian majority’s” private liking.

Do not indoctrinate your children. Teach them how to think for themselves, how to evaluate evidence, and how to disagree with you.

Faith can be very very dangerous, and deliberately to implant it into the vulnerable mind of an innocent child is a grievous wrong.

Creationists eagerly seek a gap in present-day knowledge or understanding. If an apparent gap is found, it is assumed that God, by default, must fill it.

Indeed, organizing atheists has been compared to herding cats, because they tend to think independently and will not conform to authority.

Real life seeks the gentle slopes at the back of Mount Improbable, while creationists are blind to all but the daunting precipice at the front.

We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.

Why, I can't help wondering, is God thought to need such ferociousdefence? One might have supposed him amply capable of lookingafter himself.

Do those people who hold up the Bible as an inspiration tomoral rectitude have the slightest notion of what is actually writtenin it?

However statistically improbable the entity you seek to explain by invoking a designer, the designer himself has got to be at least as improbable. God is the Ultimate Boeing 747.

More generally, as I shall repeat in Chapter 8, one of the truly bad effects of religion is that it teaches us that it is a virtue to be satisfied with not understanding.

First thing I do in the morning, after I have my breakfast and do my spiritual work, is put on my makeup and fix my hair, and I can do my makeup in 15 minutes.

Why, I'd like nothing better than to achieve some bold adventure, worthy of our trip.

I have a wonderful respect for old people.

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One should not google oneself. My mother lets me know when I'm being followed by paparazzi.

But it is never over; nothing ends until we want it to. Look, in shattered midnights, On black ice under silver trees, We are still dancing, dancing.

My husband says I have too much imagination, but I don't think a writer can have too much imagination!

My father was a director, and he used to always tell me, "You should be an actress." When I was 17, he gave me a job so that I'd be in the union.

If you fixate on the worst-case scenario and it actually happens, you’ve lived it twice.

[ I'm] humorist, I guess. Or really more of a reporter. A reporter who reports on funny things.