“When you tell an Iowan a joke, you can see a kind of race going on between his brain and his expression.”

To my mind, the only possible pet is a cow. Cows love you. They will listen to your problems and never ask a thing in return. They will be your friends forever. And when you get tired of them, you can kill and eat them. Perfect.

There’d never been a more advantageous time to be a criminal in America than during the 13 years of Prohibition.

The tearoom lady called me love. All the shop ladies called me love and most of the men called me mate. I hadn’t been here twelve hours and already they loved me.

When the poet Paul Valery once asked Albert Einstein if he kept a notebook to record his ideas, Einstein looked at him with mild but genuine surprise. “Oh, that’s not necessary,” he replied . “It’s so seldom I have one.

Indeed, if your pillow is six years old–which is apparently about the average age for a pillow–it has been estimated that one-tenth of its weight will be made up of sloughed skin, living mites, dead mites and mite dung.

It is the only sport that shares its name with an insect. It is the only sport in which spectators burn as many calories as players – more if they are moderately restless.

Traveling makes you realize what an immeasurably nice place much of America could be if only people possessed the same instinct for preservation as they do in Europe.

Time, you discover, has wrought changes that leave you feeling mildly foolish and out of touch.

Those who sniff decay in every shift of sense or alteration of usage do the language no service. Too often for such people the notion of good English has less to do with expressing ideas clearly than with making words conform to some arbitrary pattern.

Don’t you believe it. Bacteria may not build cities or have interesting social lives, but they will be here when the Sun explodes. This is their planet, and we are on it only because they allow us to be.

Your pillow alone may be home to 40 million bed mites. (To them your head is just one large oily bon-bon). And don’t think a clean pillow-case will make a difference…

When the Duke [W.J.C. Scott-Bentinck] died, his heirs found all of the aboveground rooms devoid of furnishings except for one chamber in the middle of which sat the Duke’s commode. The main hall was mysteriously floor less. Most of the rooms were painted pink.

At a stroke, the American government closed down the fifth largest industry in the United States – alcohol production – and just handed it to criminals – a pretty remarkable thing to do.

My favourite fellow of the Royal Society is the Reverend Thomas Bayes, an obscure 18th-century Kent clergyman and a brilliant mathematician who devised a complex equation known as the Bayes theorem, which can be used to work out probability distributions.

If you believe in god, it’s much more fantastic to believe that he created this universe billions of years ago and set in motion this long train of activities that eventually resulted in us. I think that’s so much more satisfying, more thrilling, than the idea that it was all done in seven days.

Ordnance Survey maps, tea and crumpets, summer showers and foggy winter evenings – every bit of it.

Can the U.S. support two Formula 1 races? I think so.

In the U.S., we really have fallen short of road-racing facilities that have kept up with the times, unfortunately, but it’s a fact.

A racing car is an animal with a thousand adjustments.

There’s something special about racing in real streets. The ‘artificial’ circuits have a certain sameness to them.

If you’re from Virginia, then you know some white people from Poquoson don’t like black people.

If you are out in two races and someone else has a good couple of races, it could change. So all we do is try to get the optimum every time.

The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.

Of course, you always give 100 percent, but at a home race you’re always more motivated, simply because you feel at home.