What happens when we die?

I cannot pretend to feel impartial about the colours. I rejoice with the brilliant ones, and am genuinely sorry for the poor browns. When I get to heaven I mean to spend a considerable portion of my first million years in painting, and so get to the bottom of the subject. But then I shall require a still gayer palette than I get here below. I expect orange and vermilion will be the darkest, dullest colours upon it, and beyond them there will be a whole range of wonderful new colours which will delight the celestial eye.

I don't believe in an afterlife. I don't believe in a single or multiple godhead. I respect people who do, but I don't believe it myself. But there's a big but which enters in here. I am much more conscious than I ever was, for obvious reasons, of what it will mean to people left behind once I'm dead. It won't mean anything for me. But it will mean a lot to them. ... So in one curious way I've come to believe in the afterlife as a place where I still have moral responsibilities, just as I do in this life except that I can only exercise them before I get there. Once I get there, it'll be too late.

What I expect to happen is that my body will fail, my mind will cease to function and that will be that. My genes will not live on, because I have had no children. I am comforted by Richard Dawkins’ theory of memes. Those are mental units: thoughts, ideas, gestures, notions, songs, beliefs, rhymes, ideals, teachings, sayings, phrases, clichés that move from mind to mind as genes move from body to body. After a lifetime of writing, teaching, broadcasting and telling too many jokes, I will leave behind more memes than many. They will all also eventually die, but so it goes.

No. I mean, it depends on how you look at it. In the sense that we all have a piece of cosmic dust in us from the beginning – The Big Bang – then yes. But no, I don’t believe in heaven or hell.

The contributor to the programme I remember with the most pleasure is the man who said that not existing for thousands and thousands of years before his birth had never worried him for a moment, so why should going back into non-existence at this death cause him dismay? Everyone laughed when he said that and so did I, and as I laughed I thought: “Dead right!”

I’d never been envious of those who believe in an afterlife until now. It would be so much cosier than dissolution. She’s gone to the next room. Nope, can’t manage it. She’s gone to dust and rubble. Gone nowhere. No where to go to. No she to go to it. Much easier to be convinced you will be met in Elysian fields by a thousand virgins, or drink from fountains of Manhattans. I can’t even get close to what they call faith, though I quite see Pascal had a point.

I don’t know, but I am quite happy returning to the universe.

I have lots of beliefs about that, but that will have to wait for another interview.

Other people get sad.

I don’t think we’re meant to know.

I like the idea of being atoms that other people can breathe in, and fabulous worm food.

I am so curious. We had my son christened because there may be a god but, equally, my partner is a science teacher, so I am also completely open to the possibility that nothing happens.

The worms get to feast.

Our friends are sad and miss us for a bit but, hopefully, they find other people at the party.

I don’t know and I don’t really care – I’ll be dead.

I will let you know when I find out.

I like to think that my friends, my auntie and my mum are up there having a big party and that I could join them.

I don’t know and I don’t really care, because I’ll be dead, so it won’t really matter.

Twenty-one grams of energy goes into the universe.

We become fertiliser.