Prevarication, like honesty, is reflexive, and soon becomes a sturdy habit, as reliable as truth. - Norman Mailer

"I'm not interested in absolute moral judgments. Just think of what it means to be a good man or a bad one. What, after all, is the measure of difference? The good guy may be 65 per cent good and 35 per cent bad — that's a very good guy. The average decent fellow might be 54 per cent good, 46 per cent bad — and the average mean spirit is the reverse. So say I'm 60 per cent bad and 40 per cent good — for that, must I suffer eternal punishment?

"Heaven and Hell make no sense if the majority of humans are a complex mixture of good and evil. There's no reason to receive a reward if you're 57/43 — why sit around forever in an elevated version of Club Med? That's almost impossible to contemplate.

I ask, "Would You agree that sex is where philosophy begins?" But God, who is the oldest of the philosophers, answers in his weary cryptic way, "Rather think of Sex as Time, and Time as the connection of new circuits."

Somerset Maugham … wrote somewhere that "Nobody is any better than he ought to be." … I carried it along with me as a working philosophy, but I suppose that finally I would have to take exception to the thought … or else the universe is just an elaborate clock.