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

Of all the things I am not very good at, living in the real world is perhaps the most outstanding.

For most of us the rules of English grammar are at best a dimly remembered thing. But even for those who make the rules, grammatical correctitude sometimes proves easier to urge than to achieve.

I can wear a baseball cap; I am entitled to wear a baseball cap. I am genetically pre-disposed to wear a baseball cap, whereas most English people look wrong in a baseball cap.

In terms of adaptability, humans are pretty amazingly useless.

It was the kind of pure, undiffused light that can only come from a really hot blue sky, the kind that makes even a concrete highway painful to behold and turns every distant reflective surface into a little glint of flame.

I see litter as part of a long continuum of anti-social behaviour.

I had spent the whole of my savings … on a suit for the wedding – a remarkable piece of apparel with lapels that had been modelled on the tail fins of a 1957 Coupe de Ville and trousers so copiously flared that when I walked you didn’t see my legs move.

Every living thing is an elaboration of a single original plan. As humans we are mere increments – each of us a musty archive of adjustments, adaptations, modifications and providential tinkerings stretching back to 3,8 billion years.

If you drive to, say, Shenandoah National Park, or the Great Smoky Mountains, you’ll get some appreciation for the scale and beauty of the outdoors.

Language is more fashion than science, and matters of usage, spelling and pronunciation tend to wander around like hemlines.

This much may have happened many times before. But this ancestral packet did something additional and extraordinary. It cleaved itself and produced an heir.

Maine is wonderful. It can be very hard. I mean, if you look at the profile maps it doesn’t look it, but somehow when you get out there it’s really steep and hard.

I ordered a coffee and a little something to eat and savored the warmth and dryness. Somewhere in the background Nat King Cole sang a perky tune. I watched the rain beat down on the road outside and told myself that one day this would be twenty years ago.

It is unthinkable to have a British countryside that doesn’t have actual functioning farmers riding tractors, cows in fields, things like that.

And before long there will be no more milk in bottles delivered to the doorstep or sleepy rural pubs, and the countryside will be mostly shopping centers and theme parks.

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

Let’s leave it all alone. I’m stupidest when I try to be funny.

As leaves cover the forest floor in a carpet of vibrant rusts, orange and gold, autumn proves that sometimes death too can be a beautiful thing.

I had my moment on the stage. The trick in life is to know when to leave.

You can leave a kid alone and it will learn to fend for itself, how to work the remote, a tin opener, and the microwave.

And I love doing this thing, and they will have to blow me out of here with dynamite before I leave.

Uneasily the leaves fall at this season, forgetting what to do or where to go; the red amnesiacs of autumn drifting thru the graveyard forest.

If I could live my life all over I’d do everything the same; the film in my camera would remain the same; there’s no way lord, to leave this love behind.

You can’t change your fingerprints. You have only ten of them. And you leave them on everything you touch; they are definitely not a secret.