Atheists

"[stamps his foot, which knocks his drink over] Oh fuck, I did this last night as well!"

"Your parents choosing your fucking marriage partner - don't be ridiculous! Fucking stupid! "That's her over there, son." "Which one? They're all the fucking same, dad! Black with a wee fucking window!""

"53 fucking virgins! [laughs] The very thought of 53 fucking virgins, it's a nightmare! It's not a fucking present, it's not a prize - it's a punishment! Give me two fire-breathing whores any day of the week! I'm a slut man!"

"Religion is over, lads, it's fucking over. Take your reformation, your Vatican, your fucking Mecca and fuck off. Suicide fucking bombing, there's a bright idea! Every time there's a bang, the world's a wanker short! Fucking idiots! I want to see the instructor: "Right, lads, I'm only going to show you this once..." Fucking pricks! And it depends on what newspaper you read, how many virgins you get for blowing yourself up. How are you gonna shag them when you're now flying mince?!"

"Christians shouldn't be allowed near rock and roll. It's not for them! It's not fucking for them! They should all join the Brothers of the Beige or some fucking thing - "The Beige Sisters of Premenstrual Agony." The fucking...! You see them - Christian rock! Is there such a fucking absurdity in the world? [makes screeching noises imitating a metal guitar, then speaks quietly] "He is my saviour!" That's not rock and roll! That's Youth Club Table Tennis fucking crap! Rock and roll is [shrieking] "I AM THE DEVIL AND I WANNA FUCK YOUR MOTHER!""

"I stood on a stone fish once." "Oh yeah, how was it?" "Worst fucking pain known to man." "Have you known a lot of pain?" "Aye, I fell off my bike once."

"Apparently the only way to avoid a sudden agonising death, is to walk around in tights with a bottle of vinegar. I'd rather be fucking dead!"

"There's nothing better than a fight, especially when you're watching it from a safe place. You can yell encouragement! Hit him with the left, he's a big Jessie!"

"No children were abused in the making of this show. No one was hurt and no Islamic cartoons were used. You know, for those of you that can't take a fucking joke."

"I was always confused with what was near-sight and what was far-sight. Now I'm not confused at all: I've got both, I don't give a fuck which is which."

"My advice to you, if you want to lose a bit of weight: don't eat anything that comes in a bucket. Buckets are the kitchen utensils of the farmyard."

"Life is a waste of time. Time is a waste of life. Get wasted all the time and you'll have the time of your life."

"I'm a huge filmstar... but you have to hurry to the movies, because I usually die in the first fifteen fucking minutes. I'm the only guy I know who died in a fucking Muppet movie."

"Recently, I turned 60... and even more recently, I turned 62. That was a bastard, I don't even remember the 61."

"Aromatherapy bollox!"

"People die all the time. It's just that you're not around."

"I came here on Concorde today... and I arrived before I fucking left!"

"That man (Ronald Reagan, who was President of the USA at the time), he sits at that desk in the White House, and the button is there that can end the world: BOOM! My father's younger than him and we don't give him the controls for the television!"

"You've made a happy man very old."

"The working classes, the ones they refer to in those political programmes as "the ordinary people""

"(To audience members who were arriving late) You haven't missed a thing, I was just killing time 'til you got here."

"The religion in Scotland is one of the most patronising things... after the weather."

"Politically correct is the language of cowardice."

"I leave you with a complaint. Now, the country is in a terrible state, and you've blamed it on a number of things: Unemployment rate, the value of the pound and all that... well, it's because the national anthem is boring."

"There is no such thing as bad language: it's just our morals that are fucked."

"I used to be a folk singer, but I was... dreadful. I had a voice like a goose farting in the fog."

"Look at this way: if we all ate one person, the problem would be halved over-night. Think about it: I could eat someone you don't like, you could eat someone I don't like... where's the fucking damage?"

"Toblerones! It's impossible to eat a fucking Toblerone without hurting yourself!"

"Chic Murray once told me he fell in the street, and a woman said to him, "Did you fall?" He said, "No, I'm tryin' to break a bar of chocolate in my back pocket.""

"I know at least... oh my God, at least 127 words. And I still prefer "Fuck"."

"Don't vote, it just encourages them."

"Nature has color-coded groups of individuals so that statistically reliable predictions of their adaptability to intellectual rewarding and effective lives can easily be made and profitably used by the pragmatic man-in-the street."

"I am overwhelmed by an irresistible temptation to do my climb by moonlight and unroped. This is contrary to all my rock climbing teaching & does not mean poor training, but only a strong-headedness."

"My research leads me inescapably to the opinion that the major cause of the American Negro's intellectual and social deficits is hereditary and racial genetic in origin and thus not remediable to a major degree by practical improvements in environment."

"If you take a bale of hay and tie it to the tail of a mule and then strike a match and set the bale of hay on fire, and if you then compare the energy expended shortly thereafter by the mule with the energy expended by yourself in the striking of the match, you will understand the concept of amplification."

"I had one experience which gave me some slant on the way large organizations run. I was not allowed to take spherical trigonometry because I'd sprained my ankle. Because I'd sprained my ankle I had an incomplete in gym, phys ed. And the rule was that if you had an incomplete in anything, you were not allowed to take an overload. I argued with some clerical person in the administration office, and was stopped there. It's an experience which I've remembered since, and advised people not to be stopped at the first point."

"I read to learn. I have always read to learn. For example, I have learned almost more than I can bear to know from Saramago's Blindness and Seeing. But for all the intensity of Saramago's moral purpose and the awful clarity of his vision, my whole heart and soul rebel against calling those great novels "didactic.""

"Saramago is not easy to read. He punctuates mostly with commas, doesn't paragraph often, doesn't set off conversation in quotes —; mannerisms I wouldn't endure in a lesser writer; but Saramago is worth it. More than worth it. Transcendently worth it."

"A slight, modest man who looks more like an elderly clerk than a literary giant..."

"José Saramago will be a permanent part of the Western canon. ... In all of his wonderful meditations upon the ruefulness of our lives, there is always the spirit of laughter beckoning us in the art of somehow going on. His achievement is one of the enlargements of life."

"[The Gospel According to Jesus Christ] is an awesome work, imaginatively superior to any other life of Jesus, including the four canonical Gospels."

"The most gifted novelist alive in the world today ... one of the last titans of an expiring literary genre."

"Ah, who will write the history of what might have been?"

"My country is the Portuguese language."

"In short, as well as being as big a son of a bitch as the lord, abraham was a consummate liar, ready to deceive anyone with his forked tongue, which in this case, according to the personal dictionary belonging to the narrator of this story, means treacherous, perfidious, false, disloyal and other similarly fine qualities. When he reached the place of which the lord had spoken, abraham built an alter and placed the wood on it. He then tied up his son and lifted him on to the altar, on top of the wood. Without pausing, he took up his knife in order to sacrifice the poor boy and was just about to slit his throat when he felt a hand grip his arm and heard a voice in his ear shouting, What are you doing, you wretch, killing your own son, burning him, it's the same old story it starts with a lamb and ends with the murder of the very person you should love most, But the lord told me to do it, said abraham, struggling, Keep still, or I'll be the one who does the killing, untie that boy at once, then kneel down and beg his forgiveness, Who are you. My name is cain, I'm the angel who saved isaac's life. This isn't true, cain is no angel, that title belongs to the being who has just landed with a great flapping of wings and who is now declaiming like an actor who has finally heard his cue, Lay not thy hand upon the lad, nor do anything to him, for now I know that thou fearest the lord, being prepared, for love of him, to sacrifice even your only son, You're late, said cain, the only reason isaac isn't dead is because I stepped in to prevent it. The angel looked suitably contrite, I'm terribly sorry to be late, but it really wasn't my fault, I was on my way here when I developed a mechanical problem in my right wing it was out of synch with the left one, and the result was that I got completely turned around, in fact I wasn't even sure I would get here, and given that no one had told me which of these mountains had been chosen as the place of sacrifice, it's a miracle I arrived at all, You're late, said cain again, Better late than never, replied the angel smugly, as if he had uttered a great truth, That's where you're wrong, never is not the opposite of late, the opposite of late is too late, retorted cain. The angel muttered, Oh, no, a rationalist, and since he had nor yet completed the mission with which he had been charged, he rattled off the rest of his message, This is what the lord commanded me to say: since you were capable of doing this and did not withhold your own son, I swear by my good name that I will bless you and multiply your seed as the stars of the heavens and as the sand upon the seashore and they will possess the gates of his enemies, and in your seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed because you have obeyed my voice, the word of the lord, That, for those who don't know it or pretend to ignore it, is the lord's double accounting system, said cain, whereby one man can win and the other not lose, apart from that, I don't see why all the people of the earth will be blessed just because abraham obeyed a stupid order, That is what we in heaven call due obedience, said the angel."

"When the lord, also known as god, realised that adam and eve, although perfect in every outward aspect, could not utter a word or make even the most primitive of sounds, he must have felt annoyed with himself, for there was no one else in the garden of eden whom he could blame for this grave oversight..."

"The past is an immense area of stony ground that many people would like to drive across as if it were a motorway, while others move patiently from stone to stone, lifting each one because they need to know what lies beneath. Sometimes scorpions crawl out or centipedes, fat white caterpillars or ripe chrysalises, but it's not impossible that, at least once, an elephant might appear..."

"Mal sabendo ainda soletrar, já lia, sem perceber que estava lendo. Identificar na escrita do jornal uma palavra que eu conhecesse era como encontrar um marco na estrada a dizer-me que ia bem, que seguia na boa direcção. E foi assim, desta maneira algo invulgar, Diário após Diário, mês após mês, fazendo de conta que não ouvia as piadas dos adultos da casa, que se divertiam por estar eu a olhar para o jornal como se fosse um muro, que a minha hora de os deixar sem fala chegou, quando, um dia, de um fôlego, li em voz alta, sem titubear, nervoso mas triunfante, umas quantas linhas seguidas."

"The man changed position, turned his back on the wardrobe blocking the door and let his right arm slide down toward the side on which the dog is lying. A minute later, he was awake. He was thirsty. He turned on his bedside light, got up, shuffled his feet into the slippers which were, as always, providing a pillow for the dog's head, and went into the kitchen. Death followed him. The man filled a glass with water and drank it. At this point, the dog appeared, slaked his thirst in the water-dish next to the back door and then looked up at his master. I suppose you want to go out, said the cellist. He opened the door and waited until the animal came back. A little water remained in his glass. Death looked at it and made an effort to imagine what it must be like to feel thirsty, but failed. She would have been equally incapable of imagining it when she'd had to make people die of thirst in the desert, but at the time she hadn't even tried. The dog returned, wagging his tail. Let's go back to sleep, said the man. They went into the bedroom again, the dog turned around twice, then curled up into a ball. The man drew the sheet up to his neck, coughed twice and soon afterward was asleep again. Sitting in her corner, death was watching. Much later, the dog got up from the carpet and jumped onto the sofa. For the first time in her life, death knew what it felt like to have a dog on her lap."

"A propósito, não resistiremos a recordar que a morte, por si mesma, sozinha, sem qualquer ajuda externa, sempre matou muito menos que o homem."