"You notice how liberals keep saying, 'If only Islam would have a Reformation' - it can't have one. I..." — Christopher Hitchens

I think I write in a fairly self-confident manner.

The suicide-bombing community is not absolutely 100 percent religious, but it is pretty nearly 100 percent religious.

I had real plans for my next decade and felt I'd worked hard enough to earn it. Will I really not live to see my children married? To watch the World Trade Center rise again? To read - if not indeed write - the obituaries of elderly villains like Henry Kissinger and Joseph Ratzinger?

My favorite time in the cycles of public life is the time when the Pope is dead and they haven't elected a new one. There's no one in the world who is infallible for those weeks. And you know, I don't miss it.