“I mused for a few moments on the question of which was worse, to lead a life so boring that you are easily enchanted, or a life so full of stimulus that you are easily bored.”

The lesson to draw from this, of course, is that when you move from one country to another you have to accept that there are some things that are better and some things worse, and there is nothing you can do about it.

Britain still has the most reliably beautiful countryside of anywhere in the world. I would hate to be part of the generation that allowed that to be lost.

If you were designing an organism to look after life in our lonely cosmos, to monitor where it is going and keep a record of where it has been, you wouldn’t choose human beings for the job.

It was one of those sumptuous days when the world is full of autumn muskiness and tangy, crisp perfection: vivid blue sky, deep green fields, leaves in a thousand luminous hues. It is a truly astounding sight when every tree in a landscape becomes individual.

Of all the things I am not very good at, living in the real world is perhaps the most outstanding.

For most of us the rules of English grammar are at best a dimly remembered thing. But even for those who make the rules, grammatical correctitude sometimes proves easier to urge than to achieve.

I can wear a baseball cap; I am entitled to wear a baseball cap. I am genetically pre-disposed to wear a baseball cap, whereas most English people look wrong in a baseball cap.

In terms of adaptability, humans are pretty amazingly useless.

It was the kind of pure, undiffused light that can only come from a really hot blue sky, the kind that makes even a concrete highway painful to behold and turns every distant reflective surface into a little glint of flame.

I see litter as part of a long continuum of anti-social behaviour.

I had spent the whole of my savings … on a suit for the wedding – a remarkable piece of apparel with lapels that had been modelled on the tail fins of a 1957 Coupe de Ville and trousers so copiously flared that when I walked you didn’t see my legs move.

Every living thing is an elaboration of a single original plan. As humans we are mere increments – each of us a musty archive of adjustments, adaptations, modifications and providential tinkerings stretching back to 3,8 billion years.

If you drive to, say, Shenandoah National Park, or the Great Smoky Mountains, you’ll get some appreciation for the scale and beauty of the outdoors.

Language is more fashion than science, and matters of usage, spelling and pronunciation tend to wander around like hemlines.

This much may have happened many times before. But this ancestral packet did something additional and extraordinary. It cleaved itself and produced an heir.

Maine is wonderful. It can be very hard. I mean, if you look at the profile maps it doesn’t look it, but somehow when you get out there it’s really steep and hard.

I still love what I do and I’ve done OK over the years … You’re a long time retired and anyway, I’d get bored.

If I’m away from painting for a week, I get bored.

Never chain your dogs together with sausages. One must accustom one’s self to be bored.

Life is too short to spend it being angry, bored, or dull.

I think that it’s a crime to say you are bored when time is so precious and there are so many things to do in life: read, learn, watch.

Substituting nuance for novelty is what experts do, and that is why they are never bored.

I am hungry, feed me; I am bored, amuse me.

It took us five hours to reach Tokyo, but I wasn’t bored one bit. I didn’t really get to hear so much about Nana. But I knew I would have loved… To hear what Nana had to say about herself. – Nana Komatsu