“When you walk the track and you see a corner and realise you were going round it at 160mph, you wonder who could be so stupid to take a corner at that speed. But in the car, you don’t even think about that.”

I come from an ordinary family – my dad is a carpenter, a roof-maker – and we’ve always loved racing together.

We always kept believing in ourselves and our team and the car.

Qualifying is all about putting everything that you have and that the car has in one lap. It’s like a rush, I really enjoy that.

It’s a tricky place, especially the last sector. I wasn’t happy in practice. I wasn’t happy with the car and I wasn’t happy with myself. But I always thought there was more in the car.

I didn’t know Dan Wheldon, but he was big in motorsport, and then this year I got to know Marco Simoncelli, so our thoughts are with them at the moment.

All these nice people saying I’m going to be world champion won’t make me any faster, you have to believe it yourself.

The bottom line is what we do might not be the safest so there is always some risk but we are ready to take that into account because we love racing and we love motor sports and it is dangerous.

At the end of your life, it’s friendships, emotions and thoughts that you take with you, rather than what’s in your bank account.

Simply racing a Formula 1 car is an achievement.

Teams like Ferrari, McLaren and Mercedes are going to be very, very motivated to go for the titles.

I remember my first test in F1. After five laps, I came back to the pits and tried to play it cool – ‘Oh yeah, I’m fine, I’m on top of this’ – but I was completely lost.

You can’t change what happened. But you can still change what will happen.

I found myself sitting in the RB7 and smiling.

Thanks to BMW and WilliamsF1 for giving me this chance to test. The test team looked after me brilliantly and I learnt plenty.

I don’t care too much what happened in the past.

Simply fantastic this circuit, and if you get 53 laps more, you appreciate it even more. It’s made by God’s hands.

It’s no use filling your pocket with money if you have got a hole in the corner.

But as we do not light up our houses with our brightest lamps for all comers, so neither did she emit from her eyes their brightest sparks till special occasions for such shining had arisen.

We’ve painted ourselves into a corner where the only choice is real nightmare – triage, epidemic disease, famine, fascism, the collapse of human rights – or a leap to an entirely different level. We’ve taken business-as-usual off the menu. Now only the extreme possibilities loom.

Remake the world, a little at a time, each in your own corner of the world.

Why did Africa let Europe cart away millions of Africa’s souls from the continent to the four corners of the wind?

There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that is your own self. So you have to begin there, not outside, not on other people. That comes afterwards, when you have worked on your own corner.

If people around you aren’t going anywhere, if their dreams are no bigger than hanging out on the corner, or if they’re dragging you down, get rid of them.

I went to Cambridge and thought I would stay there. I thought I would quietly grow tweed in a corner somewhere and become a Don or something.