The older I get, the more I want to do. It beats death, decay or golf in unfortunate trousers. Peace and quiet depress me.

Even for the most excitable preacher, there was nothing inherently sinful about a waffle.

Great art has dreadful manners. The greatest paintings grab you in a headlock, rough up your composure, and then proceed in short order to re-arrange your reality.

Charlie Hebdo: Satire was the father of true political freedom, born in the 18th century; the scourge of bigots and tyrants. Sing its praises.

Histories never conclude; they just pause their prose. Their stories are, if they are truthful, untidy affairs, resistant to windings-up and sortings-out. They beat raggedly on into the future.

Irreverence is the lifeblood of freedom.

What can art really do in the face of atrocity?

The irony about Charles II is not that he came to the throne because England needed a successor to Charles I, but because England needed a successor to Oliver Cromwell.

There are some places where history just grabs you by the jugular. This is one of them.

Nations don't start out. There is not a particular moment when they unveil the essence of themselves. They are always a work in progress.

But it struck me that the extreme violence and cruelty of the English Civil War had gone understated.

I'm pretty lost in becoming all this frost. Bitter, like Winter. Strung-out like a string of pearls.

Losing an unsaved loved one is hell, but that doesn’t mean that you need to go there yourself by turning away from God. Don’t make the same mistake he or she did.

If our faith in God is not the veriest sham, it demands, and will produce, the abandonment sometimes, the subordination always, of external helps and material good.

I have a blog in Chinese, which you can follow, Chinese signs. But I don't even update at all, often I don't.

If football wasn't a part of my life, there were three things that could have happened, and they were all bad. I would have likely been selling drugs, in jail or dead.

I go to bed every night and the list of what I've accomplished is astounding.

Theology, not morality, is the first business on the church's agenda of reform, and the church, not society, is the first target of divine criticism.

What's good about March? Well, for one thing, it keeps February and April apart.

The more you give away, the more you get back.