“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.”

More than 300 million people in the world speak English and the rest, it sometimes seems, try to.

There is always a little more toothpaste in the tube. Think about it.

When I was growing up I used to think that the best thing about coming from Des Moines was that it meant you didn’t come from anywhere else in Iowa. By Iowa standards.

I became quietly seized with that nostalgia that overcomes you when you have reached the middle of your life and your father has recently died and it dawns on you that when he went he took some of you with him.

Tune your television to any channel it doesn’t receive and about 1 percent of the dancing static you see is accounted for by this ancient remnant of the Big Bang. The next time you complain that there is nothing on, remember that you can always watch the birth of the universe.

You don’t have to know anything about baseball to respond to Babe Ruth because he’s just this magnificent human being.

So here I am, my affections torn between a postal service that never feeds me but can tackle a challenge and one that gives me free tape and prompt service but won’t help me out when I can’t remember a street name.

We may be all there is. It’s an unnerving thought that we may be the living universe’s supreme achievement and its worst nightmare simultaneously.

Physicists are atoms’ way of thinking about atoms.

Most of the time I am sunk in thought, but at some point on each walk there comes a moment when I look up and notice, with a kind of first-time astonishment.

It had no practical application in his lifetime, but today, thanks to computers, is routinely used in the modelling of climate change, astrophysics and stock-market analysis.

But what is life to a lichen ? Yet its impulse to exist, to be, is every bit as strong as ours arguably even stronger. If I were told that I had to spend decades being a furry growth on a rock in the woods, I believe I would lose the will to go on.

Columbus real achievement was managing to cross the ocean successfully in both directions. Though an accomplished enough mariner, he was not terribly good at a great deal else, especially geography, the skill that would seem most vital in an explorer.

People don’t talk like this, theytalklikethis. Syllables, words, sentences run together like a watercolour left in the rain.

… it occurred to me that never again would he be seven years, one month and six days old, so we had better catch these moments while we can.

A cough so robust that I tapped into two new seams of phlegm.

Entrance into Heaven is not at the hour of death, but at the moment of conversion.

As a startup CEO, I slept like a baby. I woke up every 2 hours and cried.

With television you are producing hours and hours of music and for film it is a shorter experience for both the audience and for you as a composer.

When Attenborough asked me to do Gandhi it was almost like stepping off one boat and stepping on to another, even though both boats are going at 60 miles per hour.

You always gotta be on time, an hour ahead of everything. You always gotta be prepared.

Broadcasters have a responsibility to serve the public interest and protect Americans from objectionable content, particularly during the hours when children are likely to be watching.

To love to read is to exchange hours of ennui for hours of delight.

My thoughts went round and round and it occurred to me that if I ever wrote a novel it would be of the ‘stream of consciousness’ type and deal with an hour in the life of a woman at the sink.