“The best that can be said for Norwegian television is that it gives you the sensation of a coma without the worry and inconvenience.”

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.

England was full of words I’d never heard before – streaky bacon, short back and sides, Belisha beacon, serviettes, high tea, ice-cream cornet.

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

It is not as if farming brought a great improvement in living standards either. A typical hunter-gatherer enjoyed a more varied diet and consumed more protein and calories than settled people, and took in five times as much viatmin C as the average person today.

Human beings would split the atom and invent television, nylon, and instant coffee before they could figure out the age of their own planet.

So, if people didn’t settle down to take up farming, why then did they embark on this entirely new way of living? We have no idea – or actually, we have lots of ideas, but we don’t know if any of them are right.