A young writer is easily tempted by the allusive and ethereal and ironic and reflective, but the declarative is at the bottom of most good writing.

Ironic, isn't it? You'd think someone as powerful as Jack would have admirers far and wide among witch-kind. Unfortunately, he's experienced quite the opposite. For Jack, the world couldn't be any more of a lonely place.

So whom does God wrong in commanding the destruction of the Canaanites? Not the Canaanite adults, for they were corrupt and deserving of judgment. Not the children, for they inherit eternal life. So who is wronged? Ironically, I think the most difficult part of this whole debate is the apparent wrong done to the Israeli soldiers themselves. Can you imagine what it would be like to have to break into some house and kill a terrified woman and her children? The brutalising effect on these Israeli soldiers is disturbing.

Despite the earnest belief of most of his fans, Einstein did not win his Nobel Prize for the theory of relativity, special or general. He won for explaining a strange effect in quantum mechanics, the photoelectric effect. His solution provided the first real evidence that quantum mechanics wasn't a crude stopgap for justifying anomalous experiments, but actually corresponds to reality. And the fact that Einstein came up with it is ironic for two reasons. One, as he got older and crustier, Einstein came to distrust quantum mechanics. Its statistical and deeply probabilistic nature sounded too much like gambling to him, and it prompted him to object that "God does not play dice with the universe." He was wrong, and it's too bad that most people have never heard the rejoinder by Niels Bohr: "Einstein! Stop telling God what to do.

How ironic, then, and how poetic, that humankind may have created the Creator out of want for one. Man creates God, who then creates man. Is that not the perfect circle of life? But then, if that turns out to be the case, who is created in whose image?

In the pragmatist, streetwise climate of advanced postmodern capitalism, with its scepticism of big pictures and grand narratives, its hard-nosed disenchantment with the metaphysical, 'life' is one among a whole series of discredited totalities. We are invited to think small rather than big ? ironically, at just the point when some of those out to destroy Western civilization are doing exactly the opposite. In the conflict between Western capitalism and radical Islam, a paucity of belief squares up to an excess of it. The West finds itself faced with a full-blooded metaphysical onslaught at just the historical point that it has, so to speak, philosophically disarmed. As far as belief goes, postmodernism prefers to travel light: it has beliefs, to be sure, but it does not have faith.

It is an ironic habit of human beings to run faster when they have lost their way.

He had come to that moment in his age when there occurred to him, with increasing intensity, a question of such overwhelming simplicity that he had no means to face it. He found himself wondering if his life were worth the living; if it had ever been. It was a question, he suspected, that came to all men at one time or another; he wondered if it came to them with such impersonal force as it came to him. The question brought with it a sadness, but it was a general sadness which (he thought) had little to do with himself or with his particular fate; he was not even sure that the question sprang from the most immediate and obvious causes, from what his own life had become. It came, he believed, from the accretion of his years, from the density of accident and circumstance, and from what he had come to understand of them. He took a grim and ironic pleasure from the possibility that what little learning he had managed to acquire had led him to this knowledge: that in the long run all things, even the learning that let him know this, were futile and empty, and at last diminished into a nothingness they did not alter.

I had always had a little problem looking out for myself in love. I was afraid people would leave me. So I sort of clung and did everything possible to keep someone around. I didn't have a hard talk with myself about who I was keeping around. Doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure that out. I clung to people like human life preservers. I thought i'd die if someone left me. Its ironic because now I'm the one who's leaving.

"The sense of tragedy - according to Aristotle - comes, ironically enough, not from the protagonist's weak points but from his good qualities. Do you know what I'm getting at? People are drawn deeper into tragedy not by their defects but by their virtues.

Ironically for a few million people in the Far East I did become an English teacher through my music.

It's kind of ironic that the two sports with the greatest characters boxing and horse racing have both been on the decline. In both cases it's for the lack of a suitable hero.

I think coldness is chic among writers and particularly ironic coldness. What is absolutely not allowable is sadness. People will do anything rather than to acknowledge that they are sad.

The sad part about our past is that religions ironically enough are responsible for creating the most destructive idea that has ever been visited upon the human race: the idea that there is such a thing as 'better.'

Scotsmen are metaphisical and emotional they are sceptical and mystical they are romantic and ironic they are cruel and tender and full of mirth and despair.

Ironically women who acquire power are more likely to be criticized for it than are the men who have always had it.

Since those who believe they need a hero/celebrity outnumber the actual heroes/celebrities people feel safe and comfortably justified in numbers committing egregious crimes in the name of the greater social ego. Ironically diminishing their own true hero-celebrity nature in the process.

Certainly anyone whom I've witnessed who has gone through something horrible and life-changing has a sense of ironic humor or an ability to look at the peculiarities of the world and find humor in it.

I think at its best the American sense of humor is the same as the British sense of humor at its best which is to be wry and ironic and self deprecating.

Ironically Latin American countries in their instability give writers and intellectuals the hope that they are needed.

Hip-hop's always reached out to kids. If you look at the last 10 big albums it might seem ironic. But when I look at the history of this music it's always had a lot of positivity.

You know it's ironic to me that Christians want to keep the Ten Commandments in our schools because Christianity has abrogated four of the Ten Commandments. For example the Sabbath day according to the Ten Commandments is Saturday not Sunday. And the reason is because God rested not because Jesus was resurrected.

I remember interviewing someone I actually felt bad for and therefore didn't want to take an ironic stance against him. It actually turned out to be a really funny piece.

He is very dry but also very funny... I think people tend to feel odd when I do my act. Unless you are an ironic person it's not a good place for you to be.