As for hearing, the sloth is not so much deaf as uninterested in sound.

Religion is more than rite and ritual.

I think art comes from some sense of discomfort with the world, some sense of not quite fitting with it.

Come aboard if your destination is oblivion – it should be our next stop.

These people fail to realize that it is on the inside that God must be defended, not on the outside. They should direct their anger at themselves. For evil in the open is but evil...

Like punk rock, like Jackson Pollock, like Jack Kerouac, it was truly human, a mix of perfect beauty and cathartic error.

If literature does one thing, it makes you more empathetic by making you live other lives and feel the pain of others. Ideologues don’t feel the pain of others because they haven’t imaginatively got under...

A plain is what a mountain aims to be: the closest you can come to being in outer space while yet having your feet on this planet.

So tell me, since it makes no factual difference to you and you can’t prove the question either way, which story do you prefer? Which is the better story, the story with animals or the...

Trees were not hard, irritable things, but discreetly orgasmic beings moaning at a level too deep for our brutish ears. And flowers were quick explosive orgasms, like making love in the shower.

The obsession with putting ourselves at the centre of everything is the bane not only of theologians but also of zoologists.