“You may find that your parents are the most delightful people, but you don’t want to live with them.”

Still, I never really mind bad service in a restaurant. It makes me feel better about not leaving a tip.

That’s the trouble with losing your mind; by the time it’s gone, it’s too late to get it back.

Australians are very unfair in this way. They spend half of any conversation insisting that the country’s dangers are vastly overrated and that there’s nothing to worry about.

Everywhere throughout New England you find old, tumbledown field walls, often in the middle of the deepest, most settled- looking woods- a reminder of just how swiftly nature reclaims the land in America.

When you consider it from a human perspective, and clearly it would be difficult for us to do otherwise, life is an odd thing. It couldn’t wait to get going, but then, having gotten going, it seemed in very little hurry to move on.

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.

I love Billy Joel. I cry sometimes when I hear ‘The Stranger.’ ‘You May Be Right’ may be one of the greatest songs ever written.

It may be a coincidence, but from the minute I took anti-depressants, I didn’t pick up a guitar or a pen for seven years.

Acne may be good at destroying self-confidence, but Proactiv+ is good at destroying acne.

All really frank people are amusing, and would remain so if they could remember that other people may sometimes want to be frank and amusing too.

No matter what an architect may be at home, he becomes a monumentalist when he comes to Washington.

Those of faith who plant sacred thoughts in the uplands of time, the secret gardeners of the Lord in mankind’s desolate hopes, may slacken and tarry but rarely betray their vocation.

Is everybody in?… Is everybody in?… Is everybody in? The ceremony is about to begin…

Take it easy driving– the life you save may be mine.