When considered against the backdrop of eternity the period between our birth and our death is the shortest of trajectories. From the moment we first feel the smack of life to that moment when we re-enter the deep, black pool is but one breath. We are no sooner aloft than we begin to feel gravity’s inevitable pull. We hang there but for a second in all our twisting glory. We feel the air on our bodies, our cold eye snatches at the light. We turn a little, as if on a spit. Then we start to fall.

So much damage has been done to this world by people who get all their knowledge from one book – be it The Bible or whatever. And if we could just allow ourselves to be liberated by the fact that this is our only time here, we could just get on with what really matters. I really think we could have put a man on the moon 1000 years ago if we accepted that.

We create entire religions in order to convince ourselves that we’re not going to die. They tie us down and they make us ugly and unkind.

The bigger obscenity, of course, is the question of how much life we’ve got. There’s no God but I know his style: he wouldn’t teach you the value of time unless you had fuck-all time left …