“Saying that cultural objects have value is like saying that telephones have conversations.”

If you spend 10,000 hours on the bunny slope, you’re never going to win the World Cup.

What would be the first thing I’d add back? Jesus. It sounds a little bit like a Sunday school answer, but that’s what I do. Then what’s the next thing? And I’d say, well, loving people. And then the next.

Just remember, during the winter, far beneath the bitter snow, that there’s a seed that with the sun’s love in the spring becomes a rose.

There’s a kind of edge to what you’re doing, the kind of leading edge of what you’re doing. Inside that edge [are elements you] are familiar with, and are probably becoming slightly bored with, as well, over a period of time. “I’ve pulled that one out before. Oh, no, I can’t I’m just fed up with that.

I don’t like celebrity programmes – but I do like programmes about how ideas are formed and evolve.

It’s nice, I think, when people use your music for things you didn’t think of.

Admirers can be a tremendous force for conservatism.

All cultures have these feelings about non-functional areas of activity. And the more time people have on their hands, the more they commit it to those areas.

Painting, I think it’s like jazz.

Humor, for me, is really a gate of departure. Its a way of enticing a reader into a poem so that less funny things can take place later. It really is not an end in itself, but a means to an end.

Unfortunately, a lot of people are stupid. They take drugs. They get drunk and do all the wrong things in life. I just played it straight.

You have to watch what you eat.

One of the things I’ve had the advantage of, growing up and being close to the top management of this company and other companies for most of my life, is seeing how CEOs start to believe in their own infallibility. And that really scares me.

Markets are conversations.

“I dont know. You just can’t.” “Oh.” This is, of course, the kind of inane conversation that occurs when people are slowly losing their minds.

Any honest conversation about engaging young people must address discrimination against young people.

There’s no conversation more boring than talking about what it’s really like to live in Newport and how the show compares to the real thing. I just don’t care.

I find it difficult to imagine an afterlife, such as Christians, or at any rate many religious people, conceive it, believing that the conversations with relatives and friends interrupted here on earth will be continued in the hereafter.

Repartee is the soul of conversation.

Of course food has an important cultural use in families, but there are things that have more important cultural uses in families, and broadening the conversation out simply from what’s reasonable also allows in other things.

In my family, Father is the world champion at ending conversations.