“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.”

To my mind, the only possible pet is a cow. Cows love you. They will listen to your problems and never ask a thing in return. They will be your friends forever. And when you get tired of them, you can kill and eat them. Perfect.

There’d never been a more advantageous time to be a criminal in America than during the 13 years of Prohibition.

The tearoom lady called me love. All the shop ladies called me love and most of the men called me mate. I hadn’t been here twelve hours and already they loved me.

When the poet Paul Valery once asked Albert Einstein if he kept a notebook to record his ideas, Einstein looked at him with mild but genuine surprise. “Oh, that’s not necessary,” he replied . “It’s so seldom I have one.

Indeed, if your pillow is six years old–which is apparently about the average age for a pillow–it has been estimated that one-tenth of its weight will be made up of sloughed skin, living mites, dead mites and mite dung.

It is the only sport that shares its name with an insect. It is the only sport in which spectators burn as many calories as players – more if they are moderately restless.

Traveling makes you realize what an immeasurably nice place much of America could be if only people possessed the same instinct for preservation as they do in Europe.

Time, you discover, has wrought changes that leave you feeling mildly foolish and out of touch.

Those who sniff decay in every shift of sense or alteration of usage do the language no service. Too often for such people the notion of good English has less to do with expressing ideas clearly than with making words conform to some arbitrary pattern.

Don’t you believe it. Bacteria may not build cities or have interesting social lives, but they will be here when the Sun explodes. This is their planet, and we are on it only because they allow us to be.

Your pillow alone may be home to 40 million bed mites. (To them your head is just one large oily bon-bon). And don’t think a clean pillow-case will make a difference…

When the Duke [W.J.C. Scott-Bentinck] died, his heirs found all of the aboveground rooms devoid of furnishings except for one chamber in the middle of which sat the Duke’s commode. The main hall was mysteriously floor less. Most of the rooms were painted pink.

At a stroke, the American government closed down the fifth largest industry in the United States – alcohol production – and just handed it to criminals – a pretty remarkable thing to do.

My favourite fellow of the Royal Society is the Reverend Thomas Bayes, an obscure 18th-century Kent clergyman and a brilliant mathematician who devised a complex equation known as the Bayes theorem, which can be used to work out probability distributions.

If you believe in god, it’s much more fantastic to believe that he created this universe billions of years ago and set in motion this long train of activities that eventually resulted in us. I think that’s so much more satisfying, more thrilling, than the idea that it was all done in seven days.

Ordnance Survey maps, tea and crumpets, summer showers and foggy winter evenings – every bit of it.

I dream of a love that is more than two people craving to possess one another.

To care of another individual means to know and to experience the other as fully as possible.

I went to my agent and told them, ‘I want to be on another Disney show.’

Larry, you only told me one lie. You said there will be another Larry Bird. Larry, there will never, ever be another Larry Bird.

In the NBA you could lose tonight and you have to put that game behind you because you have another game the next night.

One man’s ‘magic’ is another man’s engineering. ‘Supernatural’ is a null word.

Love of another individual opens a new relation between the personality and the world. The lover responds in a new way to nature and may even write poetry.

The people at the top of the league think they need to rein me in so I don’t become another Michael Jordan, somebody they aren’t able to mold and shape and make their puppet.