“18th century scientists, the French in particular, seldom did things simply if an absurdly demanding alternative was available.”

Boston’s freeway system is insane. It was clearly designed by a person who had spent his childhood crashing toy trains.

Beulah has a husband?’ I know. It’s a miracle. There can’t be more than two people on the planet who’d be willing to sleep with her, and here we are both in the same town.

There is no reason why we shouldn’t be able to split an infinitive, any more than we should forsake instant coffee and air travel because they weren’t available to the Romans.

Distance changes utterly when you take the world on foot. A mile becomes a long way, two miles literally considerable, ten miles whopping, fifty miles at the very limits of conception.

The average Southerner has the speech patterns of someone slipping in and out of consciousness. I can change my shoes and socks faster than most people in Mississippi can speak a sentence.

The upshot of all this is that we live in a universe whose age we can’t quite compute, surrounded by stars whose distances we don’t altogether know, filled with matter we can’t identify, operating in conformance with physical laws whose properties we don’t truly understand.

The first book I did – the first successful book – was a kind of a travel book, and publishers in Britain encouraged me to do more.

I still had my family, or at least the remnants of a family ripped apart by divorce and then glued back together in various odd arrangements through a series of ill- advised remarriages. It was good to know I had a solid foundation.

The real problem you get with humour is that you only have so many kinds of jokes within you, and you mine that vein a lot. This isn’t just common to me; it’s anybody who’s funny.

The food is excellent. The beer is cold. The sun nearly always shines. There is coffee on every corner. Life doesn’t get much better than this.

Life just wants to be; but it doesn’t want to be much.

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

I think it’s only right that crazy people should have their own city, but I cannot for the life of me see why a sane person would want to go there.

I don’t know whether I’m misanthropic. It seems to me I’m constantly disappointed. I’m very easily disappointed.

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

A world without newspapers or a world where the newspapers are purely electronic and you read them on a screen is not a very appealing world.

Teaching creationism in science class as an alternative to evolution is inappropriate.

I don’t really listen to a lot of 90s alternative indie female stuff anymore, but I loved Liz Phair and Kim Deal when I was younger.

Economics is the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses.

I thought, well, why am I giving up on my primary dream to work doubly hard, to do something as an alternative to what it really still want to?

Why am I an atheist? The short answer is that I cannot accept any of the alternatives. I simply don’t find them believable.

One constant among the elements of 1914—as of any era—was the disposition of everyone on all sides not to prepare for the harder alternative, not to act upon what they suspected to be true.

You know what they call alternative medicine that’s been proved to work? – Medicine.

If the imagination is to transcend and transform experience it has to question, to challenge, to conceive of alternatives, perhaps to the very life you are living at the moment.