“Every atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on its way to becoming you.”

The first book I did – the first successful book – was a kind of a travel book, and publishers in Britain encouraged me to do more.

I still had my family, or at least the remnants of a family ripped apart by divorce and then glued back together in various odd arrangements through a series of ill- advised remarriages. It was good to know I had a solid foundation.

The real problem you get with humour is that you only have so many kinds of jokes within you, and you mine that vein a lot. This isn’t just common to me; it’s anybody who’s funny.

The food is excellent. The beer is cold. The sun nearly always shines. There is coffee on every corner. Life doesn’t get much better than this.

Life just wants to be; but it doesn’t want to be much.

You may find that your parents are the most delightful people, but you don’t want to live with them.

I think it’s only right that crazy people should have their own city, but I cannot for the life of me see why a sane person would want to go there.

I don’t know whether I’m misanthropic. It seems to me I’m constantly disappointed. I’m very easily disappointed.

It’s an unnerving thought that we may be the living universe’s supreme achievement and its worst nightmare simultaneously.

A world without newspapers or a world where the newspapers are purely electronic and you read them on a screen is not a very appealing world.

America is a very seductive place in terms of lifestyle and comfort, but it wasn’t for me.

Germans are flummoxed by humor, the Swiss have no concept of fun, the Spanish think there is nothing at all ridiculous about eating dinner at midnight, and the Italians should never, ever have been let in on the invention of the motor car.

Nearly a quarter of American men were in the Armed forces. The rest were in school, in prison, or were George W. Bush.

We are so used to the notion of our own inevitability as life’s dominant species that it is hard to grasp that we are here only because of timely extraterrestrial bangs and other random flukes.

There is the odd exception, like Albert Einstein, but as a breed, scientists tend not be very good at presenting themselves.

Everything seems to be designed for the benefit of the automobile and not the benefit of the human being.

I never went after character payments. I’m pretty much terrible at naming characters, so I usually name them after people I know.

A domain name is your address, your address on the Internet. We all have a physical address; we’re all going to need an address in cyberspace. They’re becoming increasingly important. I believe we’ll get to the point where when you’re born, you’ll be issued a domain name.

Truth for us is simply a collective name for verification processes

You will not be asked about your culture in your grave. And you will not be judged based on your Father’s last name. When the trumpet blares, there will be no more kings, only slaves. And your family traditions will not be able to keep you safe.

We are born perfect, and we will die perfect. The problem is that we create that character in our story that we pretend to be, or that we want to be, and we cannot hide that from ourselves. We know that we are pretending to be what we are not in the name of perfection.

We’ve got a name for sushi in Georgia… bait

I chose the name Pi because it’s an irrational number (one with no discernable pattern). Yet scientists use this irrational number to come to a “rational” understanding of the universe. To me, religion is a bit like that, “irrational” yet with it we come together we come to a sound understanding of the universe.

When you grow up with a name like Brad Thor, people expect you to be 6-foot-4 and a pile of muscles.