“I think we need to recover the depth, the subtlety, the generosity of imagination, the respect for wisdom that so marked Islam in its great ages.”

One of the main reasons for the conflict in Syria, and the terrorism that it’s spawned, is climate change and drought.

I think we’re going to find, with climate change and everything else, things like global warming and goodness knows what else and the cost of fuel for a start, that things are going to become very complicated.

I think we’d be very foolish to expect that we can just import everything from somewhere else and imagine that that’s going to last for ever and ever and ever.

I sometimes wonder if two thirds of the globe is covered in red carpet.

Do you seriously expect me to be the first Prince of Wales in history not to have a mistress?

I was totally absorbed. I was in another world, or another dimension; all sense of time evaporated.

As technology advances at an alarming pace, the place of drawing remains as valid as ever in the creation of art and architecture.

The demand for organic food is growing at a remarkable rate. Consumers have made it clear that they want organic produce and every sector of the food chain is responding, with the kind of results we have just seen.

A jostling scrum of office buildings so mediocre that the only way you ever remember them is by the frustration they induce – like a basketball team standing shoulder to shoulder between you and the Mona Lisa.

The price of apparently cheap food is costing nothing less than the Earth!

There is no doubt that we live in an age of unprecedented, and sometimes terrifying, technological advance where the speed of advance so often outstrips the necessary ethical considerations.

To avert disaster, we have not only to teach men to make things but to teach them to have complete moral control over what they make.

Forests are the world’s air-conditioning system-the lungs of the planet-and we are on the verge of switching it off.

All I’m saying is that there is a price to be paid at the sharp end environmentally and everywhere else for the food that is produced in a particular way.

My Rainforests Project has three main elements. Firstly, to determine how much funding the rainforest countries need to re-orientate their economies so that the trees are worth more alive than dead.

Your greatest achievement is to love me.

We stand at the end of the Age of Reason. A new era of the magical explanation of the world is rising.

Will you stay up late with me tonight? sit quietly while I write you into a piece of art that will be a marvel for the ages?

Life is a lonely journey. We expect and even believe that someone will always be there for us, but that illusion fades away with age and time.

Nostalgia seems to haunt me these days I wonder if it’s old age or just a phase.

Sometimes I get my youth confused with age.

I will never be an old man. To me old age is always 15 years older than I am.

The Crusades – the most signal and most durable monument of human folly that has yet appeared in any age or nation.

Age appears best in four things: old wood to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust and old authors to read.