I have never quite understood - and this is no doubt my failing - I never quite understood why you would read fiction to understand the human condition.

Much as we might wish to believe otherwise, universal love and the welfare of the species as a whole are concepts which simply do not make evolutionary sense.

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

Faith is belief without evidence and reason; coincidentally that's also the definition of delusion.

Evolution is just a theory? Well, so is gravity and I don't see you jumping out of buildings.

Such delusions of grandeur to think that a God with a hundred billion galaxies on his mind would give a tuppenny damn who you sleep with, or indeed whether you believe in him.

The less you think, the more you believe.

How thoughtful of God to arrange matters so that, wherever you happen to be born, the local religion always turns out to be the true one.

The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.

Science is the poetry of reality.

The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is in principle capable of explaining the existence of organized complexity.

If you have nothing left to want, then you just wait. Until there's nothing left to wait for.

This wasn’t the Dark Ages, and she wasn’t living in a third world nation where women didn’t have any rights and were treated unequally.

Every thought vibrates through the universe.

Devotion to the facts will always give the pleasures of recognition; adherence to the rules of design, the pleasures of order and certainty.

I think I'm a different kind of role model for young girls.

Further, I'm obsessed with how language contorts and creates bodies.

I started in theatre, and for me, it was all about transformation. You transform into the character that you're playing.

There is no life I know to compare with pure imagination. Living there, you'll be free if you truly wish to be.

Ego can’t sleep. It micro-manages. It disempowers. It reduces our capability. It excels in control.