“Because we humans are big and clever enough to produce and utilize antibiotics and disinfectants, it is easy to convince ourselves that we have banished bacteria to the fringes of existence.”

To understand what anyone is saying to us we must separate these noises into words and the words into sentences so that we might in our turn issue a stream of mixed sounds in response.

And a really good story because he was this kid who grew up essentially as an orphan, you know, had a tough life, and then he became the most successful baseball player ever. But he was also a really good guy.

America is a great disappointment to me. As I said in one of my books, other societies create civilisations; we build shopping malls.

That’s 270 million people with 206 bones each – will only be about 50 bones, one-quarter of a complete skeleton. That’s not to say, of course, that any of these bones will ever actually be found.

I mused for a few moments on the question of which was worse, to lead a life so boring that you are easily enchanted, or a life so full of stimulus that you are easily bored.

Protons give an atom its identity, electrons its personality.

Boston’s freeway system is insane. It was clearly designed by a person who had spent his childhood crashing toy trains.

Beulah has a husband?’ I know. It’s a miracle. There can’t be more than two people on the planet who’d be willing to sleep with her, and here we are both in the same town.

There is no reason why we shouldn’t be able to split an infinitive, any more than we should forsake instant coffee and air travel because they weren’t available to the Romans.

Distance changes utterly when you take the world on foot. A mile becomes a long way, two miles literally considerable, ten miles whopping, fifty miles at the very limits of conception.

The average Southerner has the speech patterns of someone slipping in and out of consciousness. I can change my shoes and socks faster than most people in Mississippi can speak a sentence.

The upshot of all this is that we live in a universe whose age we can’t quite compute, surrounded by stars whose distances we don’t altogether know, filled with matter we can’t identify, operating in conformance with physical laws whose properties we don’t truly understand.

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.

Like every other place, I guess, Kansas City was quite a different city when I was a youngster there. They had quite a few clubs, and we had what we used to call jam sessions every night.

I haunted streets, whorehouses, police stations, courtrooms, theater stages, jails, saloons, slums, madhouses, fires, murders, riots, banquet halls and bookshops.

That’s immediately how I gauge how healthy a city is-by the amount of tags. It’s just in direct competition with advertising. It’s still one of the last things that hasn’t been corrupted.

I am really enthusiastic about my new council position because part of my satisfaction in life is feeling like I have done something. With this responsibility I hope I can accomplish things for the City of Williamstown and the people.

Nor shall the seeker reach his goal unless he sacrifice all things. That is, whatever he has seen, and heard, and understood (before), all must he set at naught, that he may enter the Realm of the Spirit, which is the City of God.

If most American cities are about the consumption of culture, Los Angeles and New York are about the production of culture – not only national culture but global culture.

My work doesn’t speak about individuals (it’s not portraiture in the traditional sense), it tries to speak about life in general in cities of the West – which is where I live and what I understand.

I bike all the time in New York City. I bike for hours. I can bike for eight hours a day and just go everywhere with bikes.