My first rule of consumerism is never to buy anything you can't make your children carry.

England was full of words I'd never heard before - streaky bacon, short back and sides, Belisha beacon, serviettes, high tea, ice-cream cornet.

But that's the glory of foreign travel, as far as I am concerned. I don't want to know what people are talking about. I can't think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything. Suddenly you are five years old again. You can't read anything, you have only the most rudimentary sense of how things work, you can't even reliably cross a street without endangering your life. Your whole existence becomes a series of interesting guesses.

South Dakota... is like the world's first drive-through sensory deprivation chamber.

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.

Making English grammar conform to Latin rules is like asking people to play baseball using the rules of football.

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