To be most effective, flattery is always best applied with a trowel.

I was an early reader, and my grandmother, who as a child had been forbidden to read by a father who believed books to be frivolous time-wasters, delighted in putting her favorite volumes into her grandchildren's hands.

Whenever I'm out-of-doors and find myself wanting to have a first-rate think, I fling myself down on my back, throw my arms and legs out so that I look like an asterisk, and gaze at the sky.

The spectrum on the list is very broad. It includes leftists who think that whiny liberals should be stuffed in a sack and drowned.

I grew up in a very British family who had been transplanted to Canada, and my grandmother's house was filled with English books. I was a very early reader, so I was really brought up being surrounded with piles of British books and British newspapers, British magazines. I developed a really great love of England.

Whenever I'm with other people, part of me shrinks a little. Only when I am alone can I fully enjoy my own company.

What intrigued me more than anything else was finding out the way in which everything, all of creation - all of it! - was held together by invisible chemical bonds, and I found a strange, inexplicable comfort in knowing that somewhere, even though we couldn't see it in our own world, there was a real stability.