“In France, a chemist named Pilatre de Rozier tested the flammability of hydrogen by gulping a mouthful and blowing across an open flame, proving at a stroke that hydrogen is indeed explosively combustible and that eyebrows are not necessarily a permanent feature of one’s face.”

There are things you just can’t do in life. You can’t beat the phone company, you can’t make a waiter see you until he’s ready to see you, and you can’t go home again.

Woods are not like other spaces. To begin with, they are cubic. Their trees surround you, loom over you, press in from all sides. Woods choke off views & leave you muddled & without bearings.

I have three kids, the oldest is 18 and her friends are going to see it The Aristocrats because they told her they’re going to see it, especially her guy friends.

To me, the greatest invention of my lifetime is the laptop computer and the fact that I can be working on a book and be in an airport lounge, in a hotel room, and continue working; I fire up my laptop, and I’m in exactly the same place I was when I left home – that, to me, is a miracle.

Therefore, I think that in the celebration of the 50 years of the present reign, there must be research on the changes that the country has undergone, and in the future, it could be used as a lesson for our future actions.

What is it about maps? I could look at them all day, earnestly studying the names of towns and villages I have never heard of and will never visit.

Every dog on the face of the earth wants me dead.

The writer’s life: Hard days, lots of work, no money, too much silence. Nobody’s fault. You chose it.

To my mind, the greatest reward and luxury of travel is to be able to experience everyday things as if for the first time, to be in a position in which almost nothing is so familiar it is taken for granted.

A tiny bundle of genetic material passed from one living entity to another, and has never stopped moving since. It was the moment of creation for us all.

Falling out of a posture means you are human; getting back into the posture means you are a yogi.

Absolute brain size does not tell you everything or possibly sometimes even much. Elephants and whales both have brains larger than ours, but you wouldn’t have much trouble outwitting them in contract negotiations.

Now they are a little like those desperate junkies who have tried every known drug and are finally reduced to mainlining toilet bowl cleanser in an effort to get still higher.

Every kid I knew had a father with a little stash of men’s magazines which the father thought was secret and which the kid knew all about.

An awful lot of England is slowly eroding, in ways that I find really distressing, and an awful lot of it is the hedgerows…

I refer of course to the soaring wonder of the age known as the Eiffel Tower. Never in history has a structure been more technologically advanced, materially obsolescent, and gloriously pointless all at the same time.

Doctor, you don’t know what it is to doubt everything, even yourself. No, you don’t; you couldn’t with eyebrows like yours.

Hikmah (Wisdom) is knowing when to raise your eyebrow instead of your voice.

I’m naturally a mousy blonde, so I dye my hair, and my eyebrows would disappear if I didn’t get through at least a pencil a month.

I miss him still today: his long, whiskery eyebrows, his huge hands and hugs, his warmth, his prayers, his stories, but above all his shining example of how to live and how to die.

No female iniquity was more severely condemned than the habit of plucking eyebrows and the hairline to heighten the forehead.

The most important part of the body is the brain. Of my face, I like the eyebrows and eyes.