I was heading to Nebraska. Now there's a sentence you don't want to say too often if you can possibly help it.

Most big companies don't like you very much, except hotels, airlines and Microsoft, which don't like you at all.

When the poet Paul Valery once asked Albert Einstein if he kept a notebook to record his ideas, Einstein looked at him with mild but genuine surprise. "Oh, that's not necessary," he replied . "It's so seldom I have one.

The whole of the global economy is based on supplying the cravings of two per cent of the world's population.

America is a great disappointment to me. As I said in one of my books, other societies create civilisations; we build shopping malls.

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.

Physics is really nothing more than a search for ultimate simplicity, but so far all we have is a kind of elegant messiness.