"At 20, I was obsessed with what people were thinking about me. At 40, I'd stopped being obsessed with what people were thinking about me. At 60, I finally realized that nobody had ever been thinking about me at all," - an old quip cited by John Derbyshire in a really touching and excellent column on his relationship with Christianity.
Derb really is a conservative of doubt, I think, and, despite his bouts of curmudgeon and prejudice, I've come to admire and respect his intellectual honesty, especially up against the Curia Santorumorum at NRO. I'd love to know what he thinks of my book. I have a dreadful feeling he might actually agree with a lot of it.