“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.”

The remarkable position in which we find ourselves is that we don’t actually know what we actually know.

18th century scientists, the French in particular, seldom did things simply if an absurdly demanding alternative was available.

The world, you realize, is enormous in a way that only you and a small community of fellow hikers know. Planetary scale is your little secret.

Romans park their cars the way I would park if I had just spilled a beaker of hydrochloric acid on my lap.

Perhaps it’s my natural pessimism, but it seems that an awfully large part of travel these days is to see things while you still can.

There is no such thing, incidentally, as one kudo.

Every twenty minutes on the Appalachian Trail, Katz and I walked farther than the average American walks in a week. For 93 percent of all trips outside the home, for whatever distance or whatever purpose,

We used to build civilizations. Now we build shopping malls.

Where I grew up, in Des Moines, Iowa, there is hardly any downtown economic activity now. Everybody shops in malls – you don’t find a sense of community in malls.

This was 1990, the year that communism died in Europe and it seemed strange to me that in all the words that were written about the fall of the iron curtain, nobody anywhere lamented that it was the end of a noble experiment.

Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life’s quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment.

Christmas tree stands are the work of the devil and they want you dead.

I just use my life story as a kind of device on which to hang comic observations. It’s not my interest or instinct to tell the world anything pertinent about myself or my family.

…and it occurred to me, with the forcefulness of a thought experienced in 360 degrees, that that’s really what history mostly is: masses of people doing ordinary things.

It is a curious feature of our existance that we come from a planet that is very good at promoting life but even better at extinguishing it.

Finally, this being America, there is the constant possibility of murder.

I was in the Rockin’ Vicars, which was the first British band to tour behind the Iron Curtain.

A voyage to Europe in the summer of 1921 gave me the first opportunity of observing the wonderful blue opalescence of the Mediterranean Sea.

Since love first made the breast an instrument Of fierce lamenting, by its flame my heart Was molten to a mirror, like a rose I pluck my breast apart, that I may hang This mirror in your sight.

I’ve known Ben Stiller for a minute. One of my first movies was ‘Along Came Polly.’

There is nothing holier in this life of ours than the first consciousness of love, the first fluttering of its silken wings.

In the first period religious life appears as a form of discipline which the individual or a whole people must accept as an unconditional command without any rational understanding of the ultimate meaning and purpose of that command.

The fundamental importance of the subject of molecular diffraction came first to be recognized through the theoretical work of the late Lord Rayleigh on the blue light of the sky, which he showed to be the result of the scattering of sunlight by the gases of the atmosphere.

My first assistant-coaching job in football was at William & Mary in 1961. The pay wasn’t much, so to get $300 more per year.